UMIS: A Service for User Model Interoperability

Federica Cena, Roberto Furnari

Department of Computer Science, University of Turin.

DOI: 10.4236/ait.2012.24012                

Abstract

In this paper we describe UMIS, a service architecture that enables user adaptive applications to exchange User Model data on the Web. UMIS provides a set of facilities that allow applications to interoperate with minimum changes in their internal logics and knowledge representation. The goal is to support the process of interoperability in three ways: providing an efficient centralized discovery service; offering a service for simple interaction for the exchange of UM value in a p2p way; and offering a negotiation mechanism to be used in case of communication hurdles (i.e. semantic ambiguities and missing response). We developed a proof-of-concept prototype of UMIS and we tested it with an existing user-adaptive application. According to our test results, our approach improves the communication with respect to standard solutions for interoperability regarding the quality of exchange, with a negligible impact on the communication costs and traffic generation.

Keywords

User Modeling; Interoperability; Dialogue Game; Semantic Web; Web Service

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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