E. Kapsammer, S. Mitsch, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger, M. Wimmer, M. Wischenbart: A First Step Towards a Conceptual Reference Model for Comparing Social User Profiles, Online Publication, Heraclion, Greece, 30.05.2011, in Proceedings of the International Workshop on User Profile Data on the Social Semantic Web (UWEB'11) @ ESWC'11, 2011, 2 pages. pdf
The proliferation of user models for various application areas (e. g.,adaptive hypermedia [6], or ubiquitous Web applications [12]) within the lasttwenty years, as well as the more recent spreading of social networks, servingdifferent purposes and communities (e. g., professional networks in LinkedIn),is impressive. Interestingly, as a recent survey [7] revealed, user modeling ap-proaches have not yet particularly focused on modeling social aspects of users,although several proposals for representing these social aspects emerged (e. g.,foaf[1]). Whether or not a unified expressive representation of these differentkinds of user profiles can be achieved is still disputed [7]. In particular, disagree-ment concerns feasibility of a pre-defined common representation in an openenvironment like the Web [7], especially in the presence of domain-specific usermodel features [16] and heterogenous application needs [2]. As a consequence,approaches on the basis of pairwisetranslationsbetween concrete user models(e. g., [5]), and such utilizing acompletely generic structure(e. g., [2]) have beenproposed, both waiving expressive ontologies as shared conceptualizations of adomain [9].