E. Kapsammer, S. Lechner, S. Mitsch, B. Pröll, W. Retschitzegger, W. Schwinger, M. Wimmer, M. Wischenbart: Towards a Reference Model for Social User Profiles: Concept & Implementation, in Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop on Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness in Databases @ VLDB'11, Online Publication, 2011, 6 pages. pdf
Despite the recentspreading of social networks, which leadstoscattered social user profileinformation, currentuser mod-elshardly incorporate social aspects. In addition, user mod-els are oftenheterogenouswith respect tofocusandcover-age. Acomprehensive viewon social user profiles, however,would be required, for instance, for building sophisticatedrecommender systems, or to provide users with means tocontrol disclosure and usageof theirintegrated profiledata.Therefore, we encountered the need for areference model,which can serve as a basis for developing more specializedmodels and facilitate communication among stakeholders.In this paper we present such a reference modelfor socialuser profiles, which isextensibleas well ascomprehensive.The proposed model provides ageneric corefor extensions,and a comprehensive set of concrete concepts fromexistingsocial networks and user models, as well as concepts to rep-resentmeta information. In addition, a first prototypicalimplementation in terms of an ontology inowlis discussed.