CONCURRENCY AND COMPUTATION: PRACTICE AND EXPERIENCE Concurrency Computat.: Pract. Exper. 2015; 27:2144–2169 Published online 7 November 2014 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/cpe.3418 SPECIAL ISSUE PAPER Semantic client-side approach for web personalization of SaaS-based cloud services Haolong Fan 1 , Farookh Khadeer Hussain 1, * ,† and Omar Khadeer Hussain 2 1 Decision Support and e-Service Intelligence Lab, Quantum Computation and Intelligent Systems Lab, School of Software, University of Technology, Sydney, NSW, Australia 2 School of Business, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia SUMMARY The demand of software as a service (SaaS)-based services delivering computing resources as on-demand software is on the rise in the IT industry. However, one of the drawbacks of the existing SaaS services is that they offer limited or no personalization of the services provided according to the users profile. Personaliza- tion as mentioned in the literature has been a key driver in the adoption and usage of various applications and in providing better service experience to the users. However, overwhelming majority of such personalized services rely extensively on the server side, without embracing fast-developing client-side technologies. In SaaS-based cloud services, utilizing this technology is necessary considering their limited processing spec- ifications. Approaches have been proposed in the literature that focus on cloud-based personalization using client-side technologies but none of them actually address all the different components that are required for a scalable and holistic personalization framework for SaaS-based cloud services. In this paper, we address this drawback by proposing a user-focussed personalization framework. Our proposed framework takes advan- tage of powerful client side browsers to reduce server overheads, ameliorate performance, establish high intelligence and enrich data processing. To validate and demonstrate the applicability of our framework, we build a prototype model and compare its performance against existing approaches using different metrics. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Received 21 July 2014; Revised 16 August 2014; Accepted 31 August 2014 KEY WORDS: cloud computing; SaaS; personalization; rich client; semantic web; microdata; JSON-LD; recommendation; synchronization mechanism; client-side MapReduce 1. INTRODUCTION Cloud computing is a monumental revolution for the IT industry. It is in strong demand by business because it provides a flexible and affordable approach to running a business and has many benefits, including easy maintenance, location independence, cost effectiveness, reliability, and scalability. Many newly-developed systems have consequently been designed to adopt cloud services, while many system developers are keen to migrate existing systems to the cloud environment. Apart from the business area, cloud computing will have a significant impact on personal life experience [1]. Currently, only large providers such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and so on offer data centers for cloud services, but gradually, small companies will also be capable of deploying enterprise cloud services in the near future. As a result, individuals will have greater choice in the consumption of services for individual needs. Cloud services are steadily penetrating the daily life of users, enabling cloud computing to flourish. *Correspondence to: Farookh Khadeer Hussain, School of Software, University of Technology Sydney. † E-mail: farookh.hussain@uts.edu.au Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.