Using a Domain Ontology to Mediate between a User Model and Domain Applications

Abstract. User modeling data in dynamic, personal and adaptable systems is usually collected immediately before system interaction with a questionnaire, or during application execution when users ’ choices are recorded and analyzed. This data is then typically used to intelligently adapt the system’s output, hopefully improving the user’s interaction in some measurable way. When coupled with knowledge-based applications such as intelligent information presentations or tutoring systems, this user model may be mapped onto the system’s knowledge base as an overlay that may describe what domain material has been experienced by the user or to adaptively encode a progression of topics to be presented next. We present a case study in the museum domain, where an adaptive hypermedia mobile presentation system creates a user model for its own use, and subsequently a post-visit report generation system modifies the data in the model to produce a personalized summary of the entire museum visit. We describe how one component, the interest model, is seeded by the knowledge-based user modeling data collected in the initial mobile phase, and is then expanded via inference over the existing domain ontology during the second phase of report generation.