Abstract

The increasing need for personalization forces developers to automatically adapt their applications to individual users. In order to realize this, an application needs a model of the user with as much and as accurate data as possible. However, users typically divide their time over many applications that individually are limited in their user modeling and therefore can gain from joining forces. This joining of forces boils down to establishing semantic interoperability of user models. Semantic interoperability already proved to be extremely hard in the past, but the emerging Semantic Web might o#er just the mechanisms that we need. From our ongoing research this paper presents the Generic User Model Component (GUC), a generic component that provides user model storage facilities for applications. Moreover, by utilizing Semantic Web technology (e.g. RDF(S), OWL) it also supports the exchange of user data between applications. GUC is one of a series of generic components for configuring a complete Adaptive Web Information System.

Citations