Realizing Comprehensive User Profile as the Core Element of Adaptive and Personalized Communication Environments and Systems

Challenges today in the Web personalization and adaptation research area range from heterogeneous user needs and user environment issues such as current location and time to multi-channel delivery of applications concerning Web-based content related to services, educational multimedia, entertainment, commerce, etc. Nowadays, most Web personalization systems implement various techniques to extract the user profiles, which serve as the main component of such systems. Based on given user preferences and navigation behavior, the Web-based content returns the requested personalized result. The main scope of this paper is to present the various techniques employed by such systems with regard to extraction of user profiles and to introduce a comprehensive user profilethat includes user perceptual preference characteristics. It further analyzes the main intrinsic user characteristics such as visual, cognitive and emotional-processing parameters that are incorporated as well as the ‘traditional’ user profile characteristics that together tend to give the most optimized, adapted and personalized outcome. It finally presents a Web adaptation and personalization system that implements the proposed comprehensive user profile as well as the initial evaluation results.