Flexible User Profile Management for Context-Aware Ubiquitous Environments

With the important advent of multimedia services and the ubiquity of computing environments, the concept of context-awareness in services access and provisioning is getting crucial. Services, especially the multimedia ones, must perform automatically actions/operations to adapt the delivered content to the user expectations and his environment capabilities, thus ensuring the best quality of experience. To facilitate the adaptation process, we introduce a flexible context-sensitive user profile model that gathers static and dynamic data characterizing the user and his operational context. An efficient framework for managing and delivering the user profile is also proposed. A context-dependent user profile instance is created for each application according to its adaptation process needs. This paper also presents some implementation issues of the developed prototype together with an IPTV streaming use case.