Task-oriented user modeling method and its application to service navigation on the web

Abstract

Value of information accumulated on the Web should be enhanced if it is provided to the user who just faces to a problematic situation which can be solved by the information. The authors have been investigating a task-oriented menu, which enables users to search for mobile internet services not by category but by situation of the users. Construction of the task-oriented menu is based on a user modeling method which supports descriptions of user activities, such as task execution and defeating obstacles encountered during the task, which in turn represents users' situations and/or needs for certain information. We have built task models of the mobile users which covered about 97% of the assumed situations of mobile internet services. Then we reorganized "contexts" in the model and designed a menu hierarchy from the view point of the task. We have linked the designed menu to the set of actual mobile internet service sites included in the i-mode service operated by NTT docomo, consists of 5016 services. Among them, 4817 services are properly connected to the menu. This paper introduces a framework for real scale task-oriented menu system for mobile service navigation with its relations to the SNS applications as knowledge resources. © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.