User Modeling and User Profile Exchange for Semantic Web Applications

Abstract

The usage of applications, which are located on the Web, changes the usage of personalization massively: Users interact with most applications seldomly, often just once, but still can benefit from advantages of personalization. We present the User Modeling Service, a service to model a user across various applications. Our service is not restricted to a specific domain and can hence be integrated into arbitrary Web applications. To enable the reuse of user profile data from different applications, we adhere to wellknown Semantic Web technologies. In addition, we developed an easy-to-use Web interface, which allows users to inspect, control, and modify their data. This Web interface is also used to create access policies, which allow users to specify on a fine-grained level which application or Web Service is allowed to access which part of the user profile.