UMIS: A Service for User Model Interoperability

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.