MultiA-Pro 2012 - International Workshop on Interoperability of User Profiles in Multi-Application Web Environments

Gather researchers from the industrial and academic communities and organize a discussion around challenges in multi-application user modeling and personalization, such as interoperability, semantic approaches, social applications, privacy, and context-awareness, and on how to further direct and capitalize on the relevant ongoing research efforts on the Web. The main objective is to set new standards and a strategic research agenda for researchers and web technology developers for aspects related to interoperability of user modeling and personalization systems.
Topics
The workshop will focus on 2 topics:
1. User profiling in multi-application web environments. This includes sub-topics, such as acquisition of ubiquitous and context-aware user models; user profiling in intelligent environments; user profiling across web-sites and web-services; user profiling in social applications; user profiling across application domains; privacy, security and trust in multi-application user profiling.
2. User profile integration. This includes topics, such as overcoming syntactic and semantic heterogeneity; conflict resolution; inference with user and context models; spatial and temporal reasoning; semantic approaches and ontologies for user profile integration; personalized services using the integrated profiles.
Topics of interest include, but are not limited to
Multi-application user modeling,Web user modeling in social networks
Web user modeling for e-learning
Web user profile representation
Web user profile evolution
Web user data collection
Web identity management
Personalized search and data sharing across communities
Personalized and contextualized information retrieval
Privacy and anonymity in web user profiling,
Semantic approaches for multi-application user profiling
Users' reliability and trust in open communities
Motivations
Nowadays, many different web sites and applications in different areas (e-learning, digital libraries, search engines, e-commerce, social networks, ubiquitous computing, web of things) are gathering proprietary user profiles. These are gathered for the purpose of the subsequent provision of adaptive and personalized services to users.
Although beneficial and having the potential to upgrade the personalized services provided to users, very little exchange of the gathered user profile information practically occurs between these sites and applications. This can be explained by various commercial and legal limitations. Firstly, commercial competition between companies prevents them from sharing the gathered user profiles. For example, e-commerce services like Amazon and eBay are primarily interested to improve their own service and refrain from establishing an interoperable environment and sharing their own profiles with the rival service. Secondly, many countries impose very stringent legal restrictions on the gathering and storage of personal user information and prohibit such a sharing. Meanwhile, for individual users, it is getting more and more difficult to manage in a secure and practical way their ever multiplying web identities.
Overcoming these limitations and developing solutions and standards for multi-application user profiling and interoperability of user modeling and personalization applications is timely and important. This can allow future online service providers to gather richer and more accurate user profiles, and, as a result, facilitate the provision of high-quality personalized services to their users. Providing a standardized, transparent, user centric and secured means for gathering, modeling, and management of user profiles would facilitate the adoption of user profile data interoperability and sharing in web based user modeling and personalization applications.
The aim of this workshop is to organize a common discussion among scientific and industrial research communities on the challenges evolving around multi-application user profiling and personalization on the web.