User profile acquisition: A comprehensive framework to support personal information agents

Abstract

Personal information agents play an important role in the acquisition, processing, and distribution of information and are of utmost importance in many areas. However, in order to meet user's information needs, these agents must direct their tasks by reasoning upon the user-related information. In this sense, user profiling plays a crucial part. User profiling is an attempt to deal with the information about Internet users and its diversity and complexity through categorization. In this paper, an overview of the user profile acquisition is provided. For this purpose, a framework is presented which describes the most important aspects and frame conditions of user profile acquisition. The three user profile types Explicit, Implicit, and Hybrid are discussed, and user profile acquisition and enrichment techniques are elaborated for each of them. Furthermore, the challenges regarding user profile acquisition and the legal requirements are presented.