The Personalized Information System (PROPOLIS) is an intelligent information retrieval system developed for research intensive communities and organizations that deal with high volume of documents.

With PROPOLIS’s categorization engine, researchers do not need to categorize the documents manually. If categorizations are left to researchers, ambiguities would set in and there would be a thesaurus of terms reflecting to the same term within a document. For example; a researcher attempting to categorize a document about “diamonds” could categorize the document as “gems” or “precious stones”. Such situation arises because every individuals associates things differently.

The user profiling engine derives the users’ profiles based on the users’ reference papers (used in the research), white papers written by the users themselves profile that the user key into PROPOLIS that includes the users’ background, research interests, area of focus etc.

Once the users’ profiles have been understood and the documents categorized, PROPOLIS match the users’ profiles to appropriate categories/documents. This matching mechanism means that users do not need to search for the documents themselves.

However, given the complexities in research, PROPOLIS equips itself with a search engine and visualization technologies that allow the user to visually navigate through the existing categories that reflect a particular domain knowledge.

Users will find PROPOLIS as an ideal research tool as PROPOLIS keeps on improving its returned results as users refines his or her profile.