PersonisJ: Mobile, client-side user modelling

Abstract

The increasing trend towards powerful mobile phones opens many possibilities for valuable personalised services to be available on the phone. Client-side personalisation for these services has important benefits when connectivity to the cloud is restricted or unavailable. The user may also find it desirable when they prefer that their user model be kept only on their phone and under their own control, rather than under the control of the cloud-based service provider. This paper describes PersonisJ, a user modelling framework that can support client-side personalisation on the Android phone platform. We discuss the particular challenges in creating a user modelling framework for this platform. We have evaluated PersonisJ at two levels: we have created a demonstrator application that delivers a personalised museum tour based on client-side personalisation; we also report on evaluations of its scalability. Contributions of this paper are the description of the architecture, the implementation, and the evaluation of a user modelling framework for client-side personalisation on mobile phones. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.