Ontologically-enriched unified user modeling for cross-system personalization

Personalization today has wide spread use on many Web sites. Systems and applications store preferences and information about users in order to provide personalized access. However, these systems store user profiles in proprietary formats. Although some of these systems store similar information about the user., exchange or reuse of information is not possible and information is duplicated. Additionally, since user profiles tend to be deeply buried inside such systems, users have little control over them. This paper proposes the use of a common ontology-based user context model as a basis for the exchange of user profiles between multiple systems and, thus, as a foundation for cross-system personalization.