Personalized electronic program guides for digital TV

Although today's world offers us unprecedented access to greater and greate r amounts of electronic information, we are faced with significant problems when it comes to finding the right information at the right time-the essen ce of the information-overload problem. One of the proposed solutions to th is problem is to develop technologies for automatically learning about the implicit and explicit: preferences of individual users to customize and per sonalize the search for relevant information. In this article, we describe the development of the personalized television listings system (PTV),(1) wh ich tackles the information-overload problem associated with modern TV list ings data by providing an Internet-based personalized TV listings service s o that: each registered user receives a daily TV guide that has been specia lly compiled to suit his/her particular viewing preferences.