The representation of a profile is similar to that of a document. A profile consists of a number of fields, like newsgroup, author, location, keyword, etc. Each field is a vector of terms, each of which is weighted in proportion to its importance for identification purposes.
However, there is a slight difference between profile and document
representations. The profile stands for some user interest. Since the
user might not have equal preferences for all the fields, importance
factors are also assigned to the fields. Thus, a profile is a set of
fields with field-weights,
where
gives the weight of the field
in profile
.
The superscript
indicates that
is a profile-field and not a
document field. Each profile field
is represented identically
to a document field