User Profile Elicitation and Conversion in a Mashup Environment

Abstract

Many Web applications have offered personalization and adaptation
as their features in order to provide personalized services to their users. The
user profiles are gathered independently by these applications often through an explicit dialogue with the user. As a result, the users have to go through a
similar elicitation process multiple times, that is, providing similar information that is used to build the user profiles to different applications. In the springtime of mashup applications, we observe the importance of considering user information in order to make the presented content more relevant to the user. For this purpose, it is necessary to have a platform/ framework that enables components in the mashup to reuse and exchange user profiles. In this paper, we present the Morpho framework that elicits, enhances, and transforms a user profile from one application to another application in a mashup environment. It deals with semantic and syntactic heterogeneity of data and schema of the user profile. We present the architecture of Morpho and a case study to exemplify the approach followed in this current work.