Personalised applications and services for a mobile user

Personalisation provides a convenient means to ease the use of pervasive computing systems and related services. Profiles are one of the major building blocks for making real personalisation happen. In the existing heterogeneous and upcoming pervasive computing environment typically numerous different profiles are used and maintained by the user or different services, devices or operators. In order to avoid multiple copies of the same data profile synchronisation and linking should be used and applied between the different locations and administrative domains, in which the different types of profiles reside. But keeping in mind the different contexts', in which these profiles have been constructed, it is mostly unknown how to match the meaning of one profile to another or how to harmonize the different kind of values in the different profiles. In this paper, mechanisms for efficient synchronisation of profiles based on semantic distinctions are introduced. By using ontology's to distinguish between semantic entities profiles can be kept synchronous even using low-bandwidth radio links and mobile devices like smart-phones and PDAs.