Semantic knowledge facilities for a web-based recipe database system supporting personalization

The recent explosive proliferation of interesting and useful data over the Web such as various recipes, while providing people with readily available information, brings out a challenging issue on how to manage such non-conventional data effectively. To respond to the challenge, we have been developing a Web-based recipe database system called Dish Master to manage recipes in a novel way, which not only covers the static recipe attributes but also elucidates the dynamic cooking behaviors. In this paper, we present several semantic knowledge facilities devised in Dish_Master, including a set of semantic modeling and knowledge constructs to effectively represent recipe data, rules and constraints, and user profile aspects. With such a rich set of semantic knowledge facilities, Dish_Master lays down a solid foundation of providing users with personalized services such as adaptation and recommendation. Users can benefit from the system's real-time consultation and automatic summarization of cuisine knowledge. The usefulness and elegance of Dish_Master are demonstrated through an experimental prototype system. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.