Research for the generation of reliable recommendations has been the main goal focused by many researchers in recent years. Though many recommendation approaches have been developed to assist users in the selection of their interesting items in the online world, still the personalization problem exists. In this paper, we present a new recommendation approach to address the problems such as scalability, sparsity, and cold-start in a collective way. We have developed a knowledge-based domain specific ontology for the generation of personalized recommendations. We have also introduced two different ontology-based predictive models as minion representation model and prominent representation model for the effective generation of recommendations to all types of users. The prediction models are induced by data mining algorithms by correlating the user preferences and features of items for user modeling. We have proposed a new variant of KNN algorithm as Adaptive KNN for the collaborative filtering based recommender system. The proposed recommendation approach is validated with standard MovieLens dataset and obtained results are evaluated with Precision, Recall, F-Measure, and Accuracy. The experimental results had proved the better performance of our proposed AKNN algorithm over other algorithms with the highly sparse data taken for the recommendation generation. © 2017, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.