Tutorial: Designing and evaluating new generation user models (NewGUMs)

Given by Federica Cena and Cristina Gena

The new era of web (Web 3.0, semantic web and web of data, social web, open data, linked data, etc.) offers new opportunities for user models, which can be enriched by data coming from multiple sources and applications.
Nowadays, mechanisms for multiplatform user identification (e.g., Open Data, Oauth 2.0 protocol) and user and usage data exchange across various services (e.g. Google account) are common on the web, and thus user profile interoperability is becoming a reality. We call this multisource user model new Generation User Model (newGUM). This user model is richer (it contain more data, more heterogeneous data, etc.) but on the other hand it is more complex and it requires novel modalities and techniques to be designed, populated, maintained, updated.

In this context, it becomes also necessary to find new techniques to evaluate such enhanced user models, since traditional ones are not enough anymore to take into consideration the complexity of the new model. The aforementioned are critical issues, which has not been covered by the literature as a whole, apart from focus on specific topics (e.g. how to create, how to populated, etc).

This tutorial will provide a brief overview of the research in the areas related to the management of such novel user models, covering all the phases:

  1. Design phase: we discuss the main decisions related to the creation of a newGUM: to what adapt: which user features to model; which architecture: how to store the user model; how to communicate: with other systems we special focus on advantages of using open standards and semantic web languages to represent user data.
  2. NewGUM process phases: the process of newGUM modelling follows some steps: the representation for the exchange; the exchange; the data integration; the adaptation production - Notice that just before the exchange phase, the tasks of i) system discovery and ii) user identification should be performed (and will be described during the Tutorial)
  3. Evaluation phase: in this phase we discuss: evaluation goals that are more suitable for such user model; new criteria to be considered (i.e. the qualitative and quantitative improvement of the user model) in a user-centered perspective.

Resources