Ontology-Based Personalised and Context-Aware Recommendations of News Items

News@hand is a news recommender system that makes use of semantic technologies to provide several on-line news recommendation services. News contents and user preferences are described in terms of concepts appearing in a set of domain ontologies. Based on the similarities between item descriptions and user profiles, and the se-mantic relations between concepts, content-based and collaborative recommendation models are supported by the system. In this paper, we evaluate a model that personalises the order in which news articles are shown to the user according to his long-term interest profile, and other model that reorders the news items lists taking into account the current semantic context of interest of the user. The combination of those models is investigated showing significant improvements on the experimental tasks performed.