PersDB 2008
2nd International Workshop on
Personalized Access, Profile Management, and Context Awareness: Databases
Aims and Scope
Proliferation of database-driven web sites has brought upon a plethora of applications where different notions of user and context information are of paramount importance. Monitoring and trading stock portfolios, blog aggregation and news notification, dataset sharing, weather tracking, and even simple search are just a few examples of applications that can all be personalized based on users´ individual or social profiles that may include their preferences, interests, educational backgrounds, and other characteristics. Similarly, all these can be affected by their operational context, which may include the location, time, and other features of their environment. Hence, a key characteristic of emerging database systems will be customizability of their behavior taking into account the various characteristics, preferences, and needs of individual users or groups of users, as well as the context in which these users interact with the system.
The trend towards more user-centric, personalized, and context-aware database systems requires new models and techniques able to provide users with the "right information at the "right time" in the "right place". In doing so, there are three major stages one has to go through, each one raising its own rich set of problems:
- User modeling, where particular user characteristics, interests, preferences, and abilities are identified as critical for the applications of concern and placed within an appropriate framework or model;
- User profiling, where through observations of a user´s behavior or through direct input, a particular profile for a user (or a group/community of users) or the context is created following the structure of the user model of choice;
- Personalization, where the particular profile is used to modify some aspects of the system behavior and user experience.
These three stages may be similarly identified for contextualization and give rise to analogous sets of research problems: context modeling identifies environment features of interest, context profiling "reads" the environment through automatic assessment or direct user input, and contextualization uses the context established to influence the behavior of the system. It should be noted that personalization and contextualization may affect database system functionality at several levels: designing the user interface, enhancing and reformulating the user query, content selection, content sharing, query routing and resource allocation in a distributed database federation, admission control, caching and scheduling, and managing the actual data. Defining metrics and methods for measuring the system´s effectiveness from the user perspective is also very significant. Exploring the possible relations between contextualization and personalization is of particular interest. First, contextualization can be used as a personalization mechanism by viewing a user´s profile as a particular case of context. Alternatively, users may have different, individual or social, profiles depending on the context in which they operate each time.
The PersDB 2008 workshop aims at providing a forum for presentation of the latest research results, new technology developments, and new applications in the areas of personalized access, profile management, and context awareness in database systems.
Topics
Relevant topics of PersDB 2008 include but are not limited to the following:
- Personal and social databases
- Database user behavior modeling
- Database user preference modeling
- Analyzing database user access patterns
- User profiling and preference elicitation
- Personalized content access
- Community-based data sharing
- Query personalization, publish/subscribe and recommender systems
- Personal ontology modeling and use
- Personal information management
- Adaptive database systems
- User-centric data management and computing
- User-centric admission control and scheduling algorithms
- User-centric query routing
- Architectures for personalized privacy in databases
- Multimodal ubiquitous environments
- Location-based database services
- Context modeling and context identification
- Context-aware, personalized computing in databases
- Context-aware system architectures
- Context-aware user profiling and personalization
- Intelligent browsing and navigation over databases
- Evaluation methodologies and metrics
Contributions may describe original research, practical experiences, novel applications, and evaluation studies.
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