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

Next-generation network applications aim at personalizing their services regarding the user's 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.

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