Ontology-based user profile personification in 3G recommender systems

3G recommender system (3G RecSys) is a novel and, in basic aspects, future paradigm of human decision support/prediction systems operating based on human-like semantic categories in knowledge representation, knowledge discovery and knowledge usage. According to the experts' opinion, it is expected that 3G RecSys will focus on semantically transparent personal user profile structuring his/her multidimensional personal interests and preferences. It will bring novel perspectives from data mining and knowledge discovery, while emphasizing user's decision explanation and detection of context-aware causality core determining this or that user's choice. As an effect of these capabilities, 3G RecSys should be capable, in what concerns with recommendation proposed by it, to answer “why?“ questions using explanatory user interface. At present days, ontology is recognized as the most natural well-developed modeling framework and knowledge representation paradigm aimed at formal specification of human-like semantic categories specifically tuned for human-like knowledge-based decision-making. Although ontology-based user profile model is being developed from recent times, to present days, it has become the mature approach to user profile modeling. The paper presents a critical survey on current state-of-the-art in ontology-based user profiling for 3G RecSys. In this survey, the special attention is paid to specific properties of source information to be represented in ontology model of user profile and corresponding technologies proposed.