Advancements in information and communication technology, and online web users have given attention to the virtual representation of each user, which is crucial for effective service personalization. Meeting users need and preferences is an ongoing challenge in service personalization. This issue can be addressed through the building of a comprehensive user profile. A user profile is the summary of the user’s interests, characteristics, behaviours, and preferences, while user profiling is the system of collecting, organizing and inferring the user profile information. Many reviews on user profiling have been conducted but none focused on the effective profile modeling process. Hence, this article aims to provide a review of the recent state-of-the-art approach to user profiling. These include methods, description, characteristics, and taxonomy of the user profile. The study of the existing user profiling modeling in the aspect of data acquisition, feature extraction, profiling techniques, and profiling approaches (with the identification of their strengths and weaknesses) and the performance measures are also provided. In addition, the research challenges were also discussed with a focus on privacy, datasets, cold start issues, trust issues, and computational complexity. Moreover, the article identified an open research direction that serves as solutions to the identified challenges and motivation for further researchers in advancing user profiling. The findings showed that an effective modeling process enhances the construction of accurate user profile for service personalization.

Big data and business analytics are trends that are positively impacting the business world. Past researches show that data generated in the modern world is huge and growing exponentially. These include structured and unstructured data that flood organizations daily. Unstructured data constitute the majority of the world’s digital data and these include text files, web, and social media posts, emails, images, audio, movies, etc. The unstructured data cannot be managed in the traditional relational database management system (RDBMS). Therefore, data proliferation requires a rethinking of techniques for capturing, storing, and processing the data. This is the role big data has come to play. This paper, therefore, is aimed at increasing the attention of organizations and researchers to various applications and benefits of big data technology. The paper reviews and discusses, the recent trends, opportunities and pitfalls of big data and how it has enabled organizations to create successful business strategies and remain competitive, based on available literature. Furthermore, the review presents the various applications of big data and business analytics, data sources generated in these applications and their key characteristics. Finally, the review not only outlines the challenges for successful implementation of big data projects but also highlights the current open research directions of big data analytics that require further consideration. The reviewed areas of big data suggest that good management and manipulation of the large data sets using the techniques and tools of big data can deliver actionable insights that create business values.