Interoperability among useradaptive systems in the World Wide Web Francesca Carmagnola carmagnoladi.

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Interoperability among user-adaptive
systems in the World Wide Web Francesca
Carmagnolacarmagnola_at_di.unito.it
Reading club 08 May 2007
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What about me?

• Master degree in Science and Communication (2004)
• Communication medium and techniques
• Currently
• Ph.D. at Department of Computer Science,
    University of Torino, Italy
• My research interests
• Adaptive Hypermedia Systems
• User Modeling
• Semantic Web
• Web 2.0

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Member of

• SETA Intelligent User Interface group
• (http//www.di.unito.it/seta/).
• - Design and development of Intelligent Systems,
  based on distributed architectures, and
  exploiting Internet technologies
• Exploitation of advanced AI techniques to improve
  the interaction with the users
• CIRC (Interdepartmental Centre of Research on
  Communication) at University of Turin
• Social Media Applications Research Tagging
  Laboratory (http//www.smartlab.csp.it/)
• - Multimedia innovative solutions for mobile
  users and workers, by developing personalized
  services

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The project which I am involved in.
Interoperability among user-adaptive systems in
the World Wide Web (Ph.D. research)
Um SW
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User Modeling Semantic Web

• User Modeling can benefit from techniques
  provided by SW
• Standardization of languages
• Reuse of knowledge
• Semantic Web can benefit from personalization
  since it enables sharing content and services
  which are tailored to the needs of individual
  users (reducing information overload, etc)

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DIADI

• (Project financed by Region Piemonte, Ministry of
  Economy, EU)
• Multi-channel adaptive platform, based on a
  semantic representation of contents, for the
  negotiation
• of requests toward providers
• Semantic representation of knowlegde (RDFS)
• Semantic representation of rules (inference rules
  and adaptation rules)
• SemanticSearchEngine (used to query the
  ontologies), implemented with SeRQL language over
  a RDF repository
• API delivered http//talea.csp.it/it

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UbiquiTO-S

• Project Prin/Cofin, financed by Miur, in
  collaboration with the universities of Udine,
  Pisa and with the CNR (Trento)
• General framework (modular architecture) to
  develop adaptive mobile tourist guides.
• In particular, the role of our research group is
• Study and management of the knowledge
  (concerning the user, the domain and the context)
  required in adaptive context-aware mobile guides
  (semantic modelling)
• Module for the dynamic generation of user
  interface, on the basis of this knowledge.

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E-Tourism (in collaboration with Telecom Italia
lab)

• Project for the development of a tourist
  context-aware guide which provides support and
  advices to the users considering the current
  interaction context.
• In particular, the role of our research group is
• Study of the meaning of the context in tourist
  context-aware guide (physique, social and
  personal context)
• Ontological modelling of such a context

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Shift toward Web 2.0
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Web 2.0 Adaptation
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Web 2.0 Adaptation
Adaptation can benefit from Web 2.0 - user
participation (insertion of information, tagging,
annotations) to learn about the user and thus to
create/improve her user model Web 2.0 can
benefit from adaptation - exploitation of the
user model in order to help the user in tagging
and creating contents and to support the user in
navigation - creation of communities of users
through the combination of user modeling and
participation (especially tagging) - .
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iCITY
(in collaboration with the Municipality of Torino
and SMARTLAB - social media applications research
and tagging Laboratory)

• Mobile
• Adaptive
• Web-based
• Social guide
• Providing personalized information about
  cultural events of the city of Torino

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iCITY - Main functionalities
See users that inserted content
Share bookmarks
navigate by categories - by tags
Share tags
access cultural events (by text and map)
access personalised recommendations
See and update his user model
Insert content i)new event, ii)add information
to events, iii) add comments
http//www.icity.di.unito.it/dsa/
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• Personalized Digital Television
• (in collaboration with Telecom Italia lab)
• Personalization techniques for the customization
  of the future television services
• Customization of the Electronic Program Guides
  (EPG) focused on the personalized selection of
  the TV programs to be advertised, on the basis of
  the user's interests. (Recommendations to help
  users on orientating into the very large
  information space available in Digital TV)
• Use of tagging to refine use model and
  navigation paths
• Exploitation of such techniques within a
  prototype system for the generation of
  personalized (EPGs).
• Multi-agent architecture to support the
  development of highly configurable hybrid
  recommender systems, which integrate different
  user modelling and recommendation techniques to
  improve the recommendations to the user.

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FINALLY MY PERSONAL RESEARCH
Interoperability among user-adaptive systems in
the World Wide Web (Ph.D. research)
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• Starting assumptions

• Personalization crucial in many areas
  (e-learning, tourism,
• digital libraries, e-commerce, etc.)

• The user spends her time interacting with many
  web-based adaptive systems

• Possibility of having common knowledge about the
  user shared across different systems

Share knowledge about the user across the
different systems she interact with!
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• Advantages of cross-systems personalization

• include in the user model features that one
  system could not acquire by itself (Carmagnola
  and Cena, 2006)

• increase the amount of information about users,
  since there is the chance to benefit from the
  efforts led by other modellers and systems. It
  lets the increased coverage since more aspects
  can be covered by the aggregated user model
  because of the variety of the contributing
  systems. Ums themselves can be more accurate
  and, as a consequence, the adaptation results are
  improved (quantitative and qualitative
  improvement) (Stewart, Celik et al. 2006),
  (Berkovsky 2005)

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• Advantages of cross-systems personalization

• speed up the phase of the user model
  inizialization (Kobsa, Koenemann et al. 2001)

• save the user from tedium of training new
  systems

• reduce the cost of user modelling sharing it
  among different applications
• and many others

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• Challenges of cross-systems personalization

• Why should commercial competitive systems
  cooperate?

• How to preserve users privacy?

• How to cope with syntactic and semantic
  heterogeneity of information over the web?

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• More specifically

• 2. Analysis of the phases required to get user
  model interoperability

• 3. Framework providing a common base for the
  interoperability of user model knowledge among
  user-adaptive systems in the
• World Wide Web

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• 1. Analysis of the implications of
  interoperability in User Modeling

• How to ensure syntactic and semantic
  interoperability?
• Semantic Web techniques
• Languages for representing data ( RDF(S), OWL,
  etc)
• Framework for stucturing data in a
  syntax-independent way (ontologies)
• Languages for reasoning over knowledge (SWRL,
  OWL-S)

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• 2. Analysis of the phases required to get user
  model interoperability

The cooperation among systems to exchange user
model knowledge can be seen as complex task

- Need for suitable stategies to check and solve
conflicts and evaluate if the exchanged data
are reliable
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• 3. Framework providing a common base for the
  interoperability of user model knowledge among
  user-adaptive systems in the World Wide Web

• Requirements
• every user should be able to declare what
  information to make public
• every system should represent user knowledge in
  RDF(S) format and like ltp,vgt pairs
• every system should make the repository
  (containing the semantic representation of the
  Um) available to other systems
• the available information should be updated
• systems must be able to access, in a simple and
  efficient way,
• to the user information which have been made
  available by other systems

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Need for a framework for storing, querying and
retrieving references to the semantic
repositories SESAME (http//openrdf.org/)
- Open source Java framework that can be used as
a database server which client applications can
access through the HTTP protocol.

• SeRQL to query repositories
• To support Sesame servlet we encode the Java
  servlet technology in an Apache Tomcat
  environment.

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What already done thus far.

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What I would like to achieve from my visit in
Leeds?
C Conflict resolution and evaluation - Need
for suitable strategies to cope with semantic
interoperability (If system A says I like
football and system B says I like soccer?) (If
system A says I like football and system B says I
like sport?)
When semantic interoperability has been reached.
- Need for suitable strategies to check and solve
conflicts and evaluate if the exchanged data
are reliable
(If system A says I like football and system B
says I dont like soccer?) (If system A says I
like football and volleyball, and system B says I
dont like sports?) (If system A says I like
football, and system B says I dont like football
and system C says that I like football?)
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ANY SUGGESTION?