Integrating web service and semantic dialogue model for user models interoperability on the web

Abstract

Nowadays there is a great number of Web information systems that build a model of the user and adapt their services according to the needs and preferences maintained by the user model (UM). One of the most challenging issues of this scenario is the possibility to enable different systems to cooperate in order to exchange the available information about a user. Our aim is to create rich (and scalable) communication protocols and infrastructures to enable consumers and providers of UM data to interact. Our solution for dealing with such an issue is to exploit Web standards for interoperability (i.e. Semantic Web and Web Services) for implementing simple atomic communication, and a dialogue model for implementing enhanced communication capabilities. In particular, two systems can start a semantics-enhanced Dialogue Game as a form of negotiation to clarify the meaning of the requested concepts when a shared knowledge model does not exist, and to approximate the response when the exact one is not available. We propose a distributed semantic conversation framework based on the Sesame semantic environment for the exchange of user model knowledge on the Web. Systems have to expose their user model data as a Web Service, and to exploit a public dialogue knowledge base to start the dialogue. The main advantage of the approach is to allow systems to deal with difficult situations by starting an appropriate dialogue game instead of stopping the communication as in the traditional "all-or-nothing" Web Service approach. On the basis of a preliminary evaluation, the approach has shown an improvement of the adaptation results provided by the systems we tested.

A New Distributed Platform for Client-Side Fusion of Web Applications and Natural Modalities—a Multimodal Web Platform

“…The ''fused'' client interface is implemented by using a device-=context-independent Java API (relying on nontext data, e.g., speech transferred to the engines for processing natural modalities), and context-dependent JavaScript APIs. The dialogue manager used can be a simple set of rules or a complex service that automatically models user context and services (Cena 2011;Thang, Dimitrova, and Djemame 2007). Such managers can be flexibly integrated into a cluster of engines for processing=generating natural modalities.…”

UMIS: A Service for User Model Interoperability

“…To preserve the autonomy of the applications, we do not impose to use a unique ontology 1 , but we only require to refer to ontologies expressed with Semantic Web languages. In case of semantic ambiguities on the exchanged concepts, we chose to negotiate the meaning of the concepts by means of a conversation, adopting a revised version of a Dialogue Game model specifically conceived for UM interoperability [10] (Section 3). We also used the dialogue model to deal with the problem of missing or unreliable response in order to derive a response when the exact one is not available or is not satisfactory.…”

“…As mentioned, UMIS extends the conversation model presented in [10] in order to solve the problems of semantic interpretation and of missing-unreliable responses. Such model adapts to UM interoperability context the diagnostic learning dialog model of [15], based on Dialogue Games [16] and Speech Acts [17] theories.…”

“…Then, we selected only a subset from the original moves in [10] (i.e., to inquire, to agree, to disagree, to request, to inform, to deny) sufficient for the goal of UM interoperability.…”

“…In this work, we implement the conversation model of [10], revised and modified in order to fit implementation requirements. With respect to such previous work we:  Revised the original communication model and provided a new implementation of it;  Provided a service architecture to support the model;  Added an event-based information discovery mechanism.…”