Determining the influence of cognitive style on information seeking behavior for proposing user profile

Abstract

An important issue that absorbs many attentions is studying the users’ required information and their pattern of dynamic interaction with online search. According to different needs of users in internet environments such as Digital Libraries, information services are prepared for them. For this propose, personalized digital libraries providing a way for different users to express their preferences clearly. Users may not attention to their preferences and cannot have an acceptable research. To address these problems, this thesis investigates an approach that gains user preferences based on cognitive style and recognizes relevant characteristics for information seeking and then to examine the influence of cognitive character on information seeking. More specifically, this thesis aim to study cognitive style can identify user preferences and explain how Current Web Personalization systems use different kinds of techniques. In order to use specific characteristics of the users to create a profile that is used as the primary filtering element for the adaptation and personalization of the Web content. This study proposes a user comprehensive profile that consists of cognitive processing factors in information space. This paper specifically focuses on the use of the Internet by postgraduate engineering students. The sample of this study consists of 53 postgraduate engineering students from the Faculty of Computer Science and Information System in Universiti Teknology Malaysia. The findings of this study revealed influence of users’ cognitive styles on information seeking and then present framework of user profile based cognitive style characters.