Capturing User Contexts: Dynamic Profiling for Information Seeking Tasks

Abstract

Knowing each userpsilas information needs is important for information systems to better facilitate human information activities. This is especially important in the days of information overload we are experiencing today. However, knowing and correctly applying individual information needs is extremely difficult, often impossible. Yet knowing multiple contexts of user information behavior can give us some conception (or a hint) of conceivable information a user tries to obtain in a particular context. In this paper we focus on capturing such information contexts into dynamically changing profiles which are further used to facilitate the userpsilas information seeking activities.