heckman thesis.pdf

1.4. ORIENTATION AND INTEGRATION INTO RELATED RESEARCH AREAS 7
interaction in augmented and instrumented environments, as introduced in the research
area of ubiquitous computing, highly influences the needs and possibilities for future
decentralized user-adaptive systems. A detailed concept of situated interaction can be
found in section 2.2.4.
2. Ongoing user modeling with a variety of systems and applications.
The idea is to enable (so far) isolated user modeling applications to exchange partial
user models with each other. While adaptive hypermedia systems on the world wide
web are already provided with the means to communicate, wireless networks technically
allow one to integrate any kind of user-adaptive systems with another; however,
the challenge is the semantic integration of the distributed heterogeneous partial user
models to enable long term user modeling.
Both subfields perfectly complement one another and promise interesting results;
however, ubiquitous user modeling also implies new challenges of scalability, scrutability
and privacy. The new issues of decentralization, communication and integration have to be
addressed. A complete conceptual overview of our suggested approach for ubiquitous user
modeling can be found in figure 7.1 on page 141.
“Ubiquitous user modeling” is a new, compound term that has been coined by my supervisor
Professor Wolfgang Wahlster while defining the title of this thesis and identifying
the relevant research topics. The research ideas behind ubiquitous user modeling have been
introduced for the first time in [Heckmann, 2001]. The corresponding acronym U2M has
been derived via UUM and U 2 M and can be read as “U-squared-M”. It led to the internet domain
http://www.u2m.org, where all research activities of ubiquitous user modeling
are presented.
1.4 Orientation and Integration into Related Research Areas
How can we link and integrate ubiquitous user modeling into existing, related research areas?
Figure 1.4: The intersection and interrelation of the three main research areas user modeling,
ubiquitous computing and semantic web leads to “ubiquitous user modeling.”
Ubiquitous user modeling can be interlaced with three prominent research areas: