A Multi-Dimensional, Unified User Model for Cross-System Personalization.

Abstract

Personalization is an established method for reducing information overload and facilitating targeted access to relevant information objects in an information system. However, the use of the information collected about a user and his current context in a user profile is traditionally restricted to a single system, although many user tasks require information handling activities that span several systems, like searching in different collections. The potential advantage of reusing profiles in other systems is increased by the advent of flexible service architectures for information systems like digital libraries that dynamically incorporate services with specific personalization characteristics. This paper discusses an approach in support of cross-system personalization. Building upon an ontology-based unified user context model, which describes the relevant dimensions of the user and his working context(s), this approach uses the metaphor of a Context Passport that accompanies users on their travel through the information space. When interacting with a system the relevant "context-of-use" is extracted from this context passport and is used for improved support of the respective information-related activity. The approach is discussed in more detail for the relationship dimension of the unified user context model.