State of the Art on Generic User Modeling

see details on user modeling ontologies

Introduction

Generic User Modeling (see  Alfred Kobsa) aims at separating user modeling components from other functionality and making them reusable for the development of other user-adaptive systems. Even more forceful, user modeling servers (or services) allow to separate and even outsource the user modeling functionality from user-adaptive application systems. For example, the  Gumo UserModelService provides a distributed approach for accessing and storing user information via HTTP requests (such as http://www.u2m.org/UbisWorld/UserModelService.php?subject=http://cmueller.myopenid.com/&auxiliary=hasArea&predicate=Mathematics). Taking on this approach,

Communication via Protocols

We aim at a user modeling server that communicate with application systems through protocols that both side support. Protocols used by other user modeling approaches are given below:

• LDAP
• ODBC
• Remote procedure call (RMP)
• TCP/ IP
• HTTP

Architecture

• Embedded user modeling components
• Client Server Architecture:
• Service Oriented Architecture
• Multi-Agent Systems

System-Independent Representation of User Models

• Relational Databases (non-ontological)
• XML (non-ontological)
• RDF/ OWL (ontological)
• XML + RDF a (ontological)
• Rules

Inference on user data

Prototypes and related implementations

Possible Implementation Approaches

• Java Servlet
• RDF Trippel Store