Community rating service and user buddy supporting adivces in community portals

Many community portals allow users to search for events, such as concerts, festivals or other things of interest and to rate them. Especially in the culture domain the users’ impressions of events is based on many factors, such as quality, personal interests, etc. Such factors can be represented using an ontology. The ratings provided by the users of community portals are often highly biased by personal opinions, and hence not all information provided by users is useful for all other users. But it can be observed that users with similar interests provide similar opinions. This paper introduces a community rating approach based on this observation. Our concept introduces for each user a user buddy, representing the part of the community with similar opinions as those of the user. The buddy uses a community rating service as a basis to give advices to users, such as recommendations for events or help in searching the portal. Our approach gathers opinions using a domain ontology, but it is not dependent on a specific ontology. -- Community Rating ; Ontologies ; Web Services ; Community Portals