AALUMO: a user model ontology for ambient assisted living services supported in next-generation networks

Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) services are emerging as context-awareness solutions to support elderly people?s autonomy. The context-aware paradigm makes applications more user-adaptive. In this way, context and user models expressed in ontologies are employed by applications to describe user and environment characteristics. The rapid advance of technology allows creating context server to relieve applications of context reasoning techniques. Specifically, the Next Generation Networks (NGN) provides by means of the presence service a framework to manage the current user's state as well as the user's profile information extracted from Internet and mobile context. This paper propose a user modeling ontology for AAL services which can be deployed in a NGN environment with the aim at adapting their functionalities to the elderly's context information and state

Metadata and ontologies for organizing students’ memories and learning: standards and convergence models for context awareness

Este artículo trata de las ontologías que sirven para la comprensión en contexto y la Gestión de la Información Personal (PIM)y su aplicabilidad al proyecto Memex Metadata(M2). M2 es un proyecto de investigación de la Universidad de Carolina del Norte en Chapel Hill para mejorar la memoria digital de los alumnos utilizando tablet PC, la tecnología SenseCam de Microsoft y otras tecnologías móviles(p.ej. un dispositivo de GPS) para capturar el contexto del aprendizaje. Este artículo presenta el proyecto M2, dicute el concepto de los portafolios digitales en las actuales tendencias educativas, relacionándolos con las tecnologías emergentes, revisa las ontologías relevantes y su relación con el proyecto CAF (Context Awareness Framework), y concluye identificando las líneas de investigación futuras.This paper focuses on ontologies supporting context awareness and Personal Information Management (PIM) and their applicability in Memex Metadata (M2) project. M2 is a research project of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to improve student digital memories using the tablet PC, Microsoft’s SenseCam technology, and other mobile technologies (e.g., a GPS device) to capture context. The M2 project offers new opportunities studying students’ learning with digital technologies. This paper introduces the M2 project; discusses E-portfolios and current educational trends related to pervasive computing; reviews relevant ontologies and their relationship to the projects’ CAF (context awareness framework), and concludes by identifying future research directions

Development of an ontology for the inclusion of app users with visual impairments

Approximately 15% of the world’s population have some form of disability and the majority use apps on their mobile devices to help them in their daily lives with communication, healthcare, or for entertainment purposes. It is not, however, easy for users with impairments to choose the most suitable apps since this will depend on their particular personal characteristics or circumstances in a specific context, and because such users require apps with certain accessibility features which are not always specified in the app description. In order to overcome such difficulties, it is necessary to obtain a user profile that gathers the user’s personal details, abilities, disabilities, skills, and interests to facilitate selection. The basis for our research work is to develop an app that recommends a set of apps to users with disabilities. In this respect, the focus of this paper is to obtain a semantic user profile model on which more precise search requests can be performed. The disability we have chosen to concentrate on is that of visual impairment. We propose an ontology-based user profile that matches users’ characteristics, disabilities, and interests, and which not only simplifies the classification process but also provides a mechanism for linking them with existing disability ontologies, assistive devices, accessibility concepts, etc. Moreover, thanks to the inclusion of semantic relations and rules, it is possible to reason and infer new information that can be used to make more personalized recommendations than a simple app store search.Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Agencia Estatal de Investigacion) PID2019-109644RB-I00/AEI/10.13039/50110001103

Context-awareness to increase inclusion of people with DS in society

Assistive technologies have the potential to enhance the quality of life of citizens. Most especially of interest are those cases where a person is affected by some physical or cognitive impairment. Whilst most work in this area have been focused on assisting people indoors to support their independence, the POSEIDON project is focused on empowering citizens with Down’s Syndrome to support their independence outdoors. This paper explains the POSEIDON module which we are in the process of developing to make the system context-aware,reactive and adaptive

Evaluating the Similarity Estimator Component of the TWIN Personality-based Recommender System

With the constant increase in the amount of information available in online communities, the task of building an appropriate Recommender System to support the user in her decision making process is becoming more and more challenging. In addition to the classical collaborative filtering and content based approaches, taking into account ratings, preferences and demographic characteristics of the users, a new type of Recommender System, based on personality parameters, has been emerging recently. In this paper we describe the TWIN (Tell Me What I Need) Personality Based Recommender System, and report on our experiments and experiences of utilizing techniques which allow the extraction of the personality type from text (following the Big Five model popular in the psychological research). We estimate the possibility of constructing the personality-based Recommender System that does not require users to fill in personality questionnaires. We are applying the proposed system in the online travelling domain to perform TripAdvisor hotels recommendation by analysing the text of user generated reviews, which are freely accessible from the community website

Ubiquitous User Modeling

More and more interactions take place between humans and mobile or connected IT-systems in daily life. This offers a great opportunity, especially to user modeling, to reach better adaptation with ongoing evaluation of user behavior. This work develops a complete framework to realize the newly defined concept of ubiquitous user modeling. The developed tools cover methods for the uniform exchange and the semantic integration of partial user models. They also account for the extended needs for privacy and the right of every human for introspection and control of their collected data. The SITUATIONALSTATEMENTS and the exchange language USERML have been developed on the syntactical level, while the general user model ontology GUMO and the UBISWORLD ontology have been developed on the semantical level. A multilevel conflict resolution method, which handles the problem of contradictory statements, has been implemented together with a web-based user model service, such that the road capability and the scalability can be proven with this approach.Immer häufiger auftretende Interaktionen im täglichen Leben zwischen Menschen und vernetzten oder mobilen IT-Systemen bieten insbesondere für die Benutzermodellierung eine große Chance, durch ständige Evaluation des Benutzerverhaltens verbesserte Adaptionsleistungen zu erzielen. Die vorliegende Arbeit entwickelt ein komplettes Rahmensystem, um dieses neu definierte Konzept der ubiquitären Benutzermodellierung zu realisieren. Die erarbeiteten Werkzeuge umfassen Methoden zum einheitlichen Austausch und zur semantischen Integration von partiellen Benutzermodellen. Sie berücksichtigen aber auch die erhöhten Anforderungen an die Privatsphäre, sowie das Recht der Menschen auf Introspektion und Kontrolle über die erhobenen Daten. Auf syntaktischer Ebene werden die situationsbeschreibenden Aussagen sowie die Austauschsprache UserML entworfen. Auf semantischer Ebene werden die allgemeine Benutzermodell-Ontologie GUMO und die UBISWELT-Ontologie entwickelt. Ein mehrstufiger Konfliktlösungsmechanismus, der das Problem sich widersprechender Aussagen bearbeitet, wird zusammen mit einem webbasierten Benutzermodell-Service implementiert, sodass die Praxistauglichkeit und die Skalierbarkeit dieses Ansatzes an mehreren Beispielen gezeigt werden kann

User modeling for exploratory search on the Social Web. Exploiting social bookmarking systems for user model extraction, evaluation and integration

Exploratory search is an information seeking strategy that extends be- yond the query-and-response paradigm of traditional Information Retrieval models. Users browse through information to discover novel content and to learn more about the newly discovered things. Social bookmarking systems integrate well with exploratory search, because they allow one to search, browse, and filter social bookmarks. Our contribution is an exploratory tag search engine that merges social bookmarking with exploratory search. For this purpose, we have applied collaborative filtering to recommend tags to users. User models are an im- portant prerequisite for recommender systems. We have produced a method to algorithmically extract user models from folksonomies, and an evaluation method to measure the viability of these user models for exploratory search. According to our evaluation web-scale user modeling, which integrates user models from various services across the Social Web, can improve exploratory search. Within this thesis we also provide a method for user model integra- tion. Our exploratory tag search engine implements the findings of our user model extraction, evaluation, and integration methods. It facilitates ex- ploratory search on social bookmarks from Delicious and Connotea and pub- lishes extracted user models as Linked Data