PTV: Intelligent Personalised TV Guides

Although today’ s world offers us unprecedented access to greater and greater amounts of electronic information, we are faced with significant problems when it comes to finding the right information at the right time ‐ this is the essence of the information overload problem. One of the proposed solutions to this problem is to develop technologies for automatically learning about the implicit and explicit preferences of individual users in order to customise and personalise the search for relevant information. In this paper we describe the development of the PTV system (Personalised Television Listings ‐ http://www.ptv.ie) which tackles the information overload problem associated with modern TV listings data, by providing an Internet-based personalised TV listings service so that each registered user receives a daily TV guide that has been specially compiled to suit their particular viewing preferences.