Olaf Droegehorn

UPOS: User Profile Ontology with Situation-Dependent Preferences Support

Context-aware adaptive systems aim at automatically personalizing the users environment depending on the users situation, and hence, minimizing user interaction with the system. We present a novel user profile ontology that is dedicated to describe situation-dependent sub-profiles. This ontology can be used by context-aware adaptive service platforms for mobile communication and information services to automatically trigger the situation-dependent personalization of services. The design of this novel ontology also takes into consideration recommendations from the human factors research area. In particular, the ontology enables the easy specification of situational conditions and situation-dependent user sub-profiles.

Mobile Ontology: Towards a Standardized Semantic Model for the Mobile Domain

Ontologies will be crucial for the future development of Next Generation Service Delivery Platforms. While various projects have defined ontologies for the mobile domain, there is yet little agreement on a common semantic model. One reason is the intrinsically hard problem of finding, using, mapping and evolving already existing ontologies. In this paper we present the Mobile Ontology, an effort within the IST project SPICE to converge towards a standardized ontology. Our approach is based on a minimal core ontology that defines common concepts for sub-ontologies of relevant domains and that is easily extensible towards existing and future ontologies. It is our intention to make this ontology available to other projects and collaboratively work on standardized ontology for the mobile domain.

Managing and Delivering Context-Dependent User Preferences in Ubiquitous Computing Environments

We present a user profile management component for ubiquitous computing environments that provides management, inquiry and delivery of context-dependent user preferences. In particular, our approach takes into account that users act differently depending on their current context, and hence, that a user can be described by different submodels that represent the users preferences within different contexts. Furthermore, our approach takes into account that different applications usually adhere to different semantics

User Profile Management on Service Platforms for Ubiquitous Computing Environments

We present a user profile management approach that takes into account basic requirements for its execution on service platforms for ubiquitous computing environments. In particular, our approach provides means for managing and delivering context-dependent user profiles for several applications and decouples the application development from context processing. In addition, it takes into account the re-use and sharing of application-related user data between different applications. Hence, on the one hand, our approach considers the increasing trend to research and develop context-aware and personalized applications for the wireless world. On the other hand it also takes into account the fact that, in general, application and service developers do not agree on common semantics, which complicates the re-use and sharing of user data.

User Profile Selection by Means of Ontology Reasoning

Service delivery platforms in telecommunication environments aim to host multiple services and to provide context-awareness and personalization features. This calls for an appropriate management of user profiles containing general user information as well as situation-dependent user preferences for the contextual personalization of these services. We present a user profile selection approach that decides on the selection of matching situation-dependent user preferences concerning the users current situation. The presented approach takes advantage of ontology reasoning and is compared to other approaches. The comparison shows that our ontology reasoning based approach allows for more expressiveness concerning the specification of situation-dependent user preferences and hence leads to an added value for platform users.

Professional and end-user-driven service creation in the SPICE platform

Services are becoming the foundation of the Telecommunication and Internet world. The ability to fast and cost-efficient create, provision and manage services will become a driving force in the overall competition. A major step forward for a rich service environment is to give end-users the ability to create their own services. The SPICE platform provides an environment for future converged services. Using the SPICE tool chain for service creation professional developers can build services combining Internet and Telecommunication service enablers. End-user driven service creation explore the creativity and needs of the real users. We explain how professional services can be created in such a way that they stimulate the uptake of end-user services. Finally, we explain the design aspect of privacy preserving service enablers which will allow network operator to take a central role in the overall service economy while preserving essential requirements like privacy.

Making a case for situation-dependent user profiles in context-aware environments

Next-generation network applications aim at personalizing their services regarding the users situation. This process calls for an adequate management of situation-dependent user preferences. We present arguments making clear the benefits of structuring a user profile into situation-dependent sub-profiles, especially for context-aware systems that comprise a huge agglomeration of situation-dependent user preferences. Whereas we only shortly address this approach from a human factors research perspective, we provide a detailed analytic evaluation why situation-dependent sub-profiles are superior to currently available user profile structuring approaches from a technical perspective. In particular, we show that runtime performance for searching matching situation-dependent user preferences after a situation change is superior, in case user preferences are clustered into situation-dependent sub-profiles.

A Scalable Location Aware Service Platform for Mobile Applications Based on Java RMI

In this paper, a generic service platform for supporting location aware applications is presented. The platform is based on Java to be independent of operating systems. We use RMI (Remote Method Invocation) for communication in the distributed system and Jini as an additional tool to offer and find services. The mobile client invokes methods on platform objects via RMI and offers its own remote methods to be used by the platform. To ensure the scalability of the system, central units (platform servers) are replicated in accordance with the deployment scenario. A new mechanism for the hand-over of objects, shared by clients and servers, between platform units is described. We introduce a new concept of objects and auras for efficient support of innovative location aware applications. The platform is also extended for thin clients without a JVM (Java Virtual Machine). A thin client communicates with the platform via a platform gateway using e.g. HTTP.

Optimizing background-communication of mobile devices and sensors to drive End-User Services

Developing system software for ubiquitous computing makes consideration of numerous requirements necessary. This is primarily due to the dynamic, mobile, unpredictable and heterogeneous environment of ubiquitous computing systems. Middleware provide solutions to common tasks in ubiquitous computing, e.g. communication, discovery, deployment, personalisation, group management etc.

Evaluation of the Technology Agnostic Service Creation Approach

The current computing and communication services provide convenience and functionality. The creation of these services is however not an easy task. Service development is still mainly technical oriented, where service creation tools are meant for serving and assisting the professional developers. In other words, service creation is not seen as a task for end-users. In our research, we wish to enable service creation for the end-users. This is achieved by introducing the technology agnostic approach into the process. In this paper, we present the conceptual architecture as the proposed solution. Prototype tools were designed and implemented as proof of concept. An evaluation event was held to obtain user feedback on the approach and the prototype tools. This paper presents and discusses the outcome of the evaluation.