Personal lifelong user model clouds

This paper explores an architecture for very long term usermodelling, based upon personal user model clouds. These ensure that theindividual's applications can access their model whenever it is needed.At the same time, the user can control the use of their user model. So,they can ensure it is accessed only when and where they wish, by applicationsthat they wish. We consider the challenges of representing usermodels so that they can be reused by multiple applications. We indicatepotential synergies between distributed and centralised user modellingarchitectures, proposing an architecture which combines both. Finallywe discuss implications of our approach for consistency and freshness ofthe user model information.