The popularity of the online dating industry has grown immensely over the past decade. There is an abundance of online dating websites with various features to attract users. The Semantic Web is a major endeavor that aims to have information on the web be not only machine-readable but also machine understandable. Online dating is a good candidate for such a service since it is based primarily on user provided information. By organizing user information in a comprehensive knowledge base users can be matched more efficiently. In this thesis, semantic web tools, such as ontology languages and reasoning software, were investigated to determine which ones would work best in the online dating website model. An ontology is presented that models the properties of user profiles on a dating website, as well as a semantic matching system. Rules and reasoning are used to infer additional facts about users to be used in the matching process, therefore providing a more accurate match. This prototype, a semantic matchmaking system for online dating, has been implemented in Java using the Jena interface. Results of running the prototype on a commercial dating website are reported.
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