Towards a Tag-Based User Model: How Can User Model Benefit from Tags?

Abstract. Social tagging is a kind of social annotation by which users label resources, typically web objects, by means of keywords with the goal of sharing, discovering and recovering them. In this paper we investigate the possibility of exploiting the user tagging activity in order to infer knowledge about the user. Up to now the relation between tagging and user modeling seems not to be investigated in depth. Given the widespread diffusion of web tools for collaborative tagging, it is interesting to understand how user modeling can benefit from this feedback. 1 Introduction and state of the art With the beginning of the new millennium, the Web has seen a big transformation which led to the explosion of the so-called “social software ” and to the definition of a new paradigm of the Web, the Web 2.0 1. This new paradigm offers users several ways to participate in the creation of web content: it makes easy and stimulating th

RSS-based interoperability for user adaptive systems

Abstract. This paper presents an approach to exploit widely used tag annotations to address two important issues in user-adaptive systems: the cold-start problem and the integration of distributed user models. The paper provides an example of re-use of user interaction data (tags) generated by one application into another one in similar domains for providing cross-system recommendations.

Tag-based User Modeling for Social Multi-Device Adaptive Guides

This paper aims to demonstrate that the principles of adaptation and user modeling, especially social annotation, can be integrated fruitfully with those of the Web 2.0 paradigm and thereby enhance in the domain of cultural heritage. We propose a framework for improving recommender systems through exploiting the users tagging activity. We maintain that Web 2.0’s participative features can be exploited by adaptive web-based systems in order to enrich and extend the user model, improve social navigation and enrich information from a bottom-up perspective. Thus our approach stresses social annotation as a new and powerful kind of feedback and as a way to infer knowledge about users. The prototype implementation of our framework in the domain of cultural heritage is named iCITY. It is serving to demonstrate the validity of our approach and to highlight the benefits of this approach specifically for cultural heritage. iCITY is an adaptive, social, multi-device recommender guide that provides information about the cultural resources and events promoting the cultural heritage in the city of Torino. Our paper first describes this system and then discusses the results of a set of evaluations that were carried out at different stages of the systems development and aimed at validating the framework and implementation of this specific prototype. In particular, we carried out a heuristic evaluation and two sets of usability tests, aimed at checking the usability of the user interface, specifically of the adaptive behavior of the system. Moreover, we conducted evaluations aimed at investigating the role of tags in the definition of the user model and the impact of tags on the accuracy of recommendations. Our results are encouraging

iCITY - an adaptive social mobile guide for cultural events

In this paper we introduce iCITY, a project aimed to be a social adaptive mobile guide that exploits Semantic Web technologies in a Web 2.0 vision in order to provide cultural events of the city of Torino. The main goal of the iCITY project is to show i) how navigation and information retrieval in ubiquitous environment may be improved using Web 2.0 principles, in particular by means of social tagging; ii) the advantages of social networks and users\u2019 collective knowledge for providing accurate and trustworthy information