USER PROFILES IN ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS
Cláudio Teixeira, Joaquim Sousa Pinto and Joaquim Arnaldo Martins
IEETA – Instituto de Engenharia Electrónica e Telemática de Aveiro
Universidade de Aveiro, Portugal
Keywords: User profile, Dynamic user profile, Stereotypes.
Abstract: In an organizational/corporative environment, each user can perform different roles throughout the time.
Dynamic user profiles can be used to accomplish this variation specification. A user profile is a set of
information about a given user in a given context and on a specific period of time. The concept of dynamic
profiling simply means that the relevant information about the user can vary in time. User profiling is
usually related to web advertisement of goods and services for a user in a web site, by means of gathering
information of the user’s interests and then harvesting the web over these interests. The profile discussed in
this paper is service related, directly depending from the user’s condition in an organization.
1 INTRODUCTION
Corporative web portals provide an insight of the
organization, often ignoring the user’s own
perspective of it. When a user accesses the portal,
he’s expecting to get a personalized view of the
company’s information. It’s not just let him access
information to which he has been authorized, but
rearranging the web layout to fulfil this task in a user
centric perspective.
Traditional user modelling systems rely on
stereotypes (Alfred, 2001; Elaine, 1998; Kobsa,
1995) to build the user profile.
When working in corporative environments,
partial user information is already in the system at
first log in. If the software application can access
this information, it may provide an adaptable
interface since the user’s first visit. This is known as
“quick adaptation” (Alfred, 2001).
Stereotypes as defined in the state of the art may
not be the best approach for personalization of
corporative users. Following the work in (Teixeira,
Pinto, & Martins, 2006), we propose a different
approach to user modelling, based in “basic
profiles”.
In this paper we will review the user model
according to the state of the art, followed by our
approach to basic profiles. We will explain that even
though different from the overall approaches, the
basic profile and the Profile Management System are
solid alternatives when addressing personalization of
organization users.
2 RELATED WORK
“Personalization allows users to obtain information
that is adapted to their needs, goals, knowledge,
interests or other characteristics” (Andreas, Marcus,
& Andreas, 2005). This is achieved by the use of
user models.
A quick way of getting an individual user model
is using the user’s available information (personal
and professional information, interests, socio-
demographic, behaviour …) and determining in
which pre-existing set of characteristics he best fits.
This set of characteristics is defined as a stereotype.
The conditions that take part in defining if and how
a stereotype is attributed to a user are referred to as
trigger conditions. The stereotype describes the
expected behaviour of a particular class of users and
can be used as an initial user profile.
A user profile is an individual user model, a
collection of information that describes the user’s
needs, preferences and interests. It’s a collection of
information that describes an individual (G.
Adomavicius, 1999) with data adequate to the
system. The data gathering process is called user
profiling which “is typically either knowledge-based
or behaviour-based” (Elaine, 1998; Middleton,
Shadbolt, & Roure, 2004). In our research, the
knowledge-based information concerns who the user
is and what he can access in the organization. The
behaviour-based information will not be considered
even though it may be interesting in some automated
329
Teixeira C., Sousa Pinto J. and Arnaldo Martins J. (2008).
USER PROFILES IN ORGANIZATIONAL ENVIRONMENTS.
In Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies, pages 329-332
DOI: 10.5220/0001530403290332
Copyright
c
 SciTePress

personalization scenarios like frequent viewed areas
in the application or usage of advanced features.
Profile information can be divided into two
categories (G. Adomavicius, 1999): demographic
and transactional. The first describes who the user is,
and the second what the user does. In recommender
systems, the transactional data refers to the history
of purchases.
Most stereotype definitions are unstructured, in
the sense that there cannot be an inheritance of
stereotypes to build a user profile. The notion of a
given stereotype being a specialization of other
doesn’t seem to exist. The main exception seems to
be (Brajnik & Tasso, 1994), that considers a
hierarchically ordered set of basic user modelling
purposes.
User modelling is not just about using the
obtained profiles. In order to be efficient while in
production, the storage mechanism must be
considered. Therefore, how are the canonical user
models and the user profiles stored?
The majority of user model systems are shell
systems, even though there are increasingly more
exceptions, as pointed by (Alfred, 2001; Alfred &
Josef, 2006; Judy, Bob, & Piers, 2002). In (Alfred &
Josef, 2006) authors present UMS, a user modelling
server that is based on the Lightweight Directory
Access Protocol. UMS extends traditional LDAP
container schema to store the required information.
3 USER PROFILES
We proposed a structured profile approach, in which
each user profile is the aggregation of several basic
profiles. These basic profile definitions can be seen
as transactional templates, since they define what a
user can do in the system. For a detailed description
of basic profile and user profile according to the
model here described, please refer to (Teixeira,
Pinto, & Martins, 2006).
3.1 Basic Profile
Bearing in mind the application scope, each basic
profile holds information on what can be done with
this basic profile and how it should be presented to a
user.
This approach differs from the current state of
the art on user modelling: we are not defining
adaptable interfaces for content or products; we are
using user modelling to customize access to services
within a corporate environment, based on dynamic
roles. Still, some parallelisms can be made with
profile and prediction stereotypes (Liliana & Anna,
2000): the profile part resembles the formal process
within the organization that attributes the basic
profile and the prediction part is the actual basic
profile, since it describes user features - service
usage permissions in this case.
3.2 User Profile
This user profile approach is service related, directly
dependent of the user’s condition in the
organization. The user cannot change these
conditions; it’s up to some formal process in the
organization to issue and revoke user permissions.
At his first visit in the system, the user’s profile
will merely be a set of basic profiles applied to a
particular user. However, the user has the possibility
to customize the entire application, as well as a
particular service to which he may access at the
moment. More importantly, it’s possible for each
service in the application to access the user’s current
profile and adapt its information accordingly with
personal tastes, or themes.
Each user profile is almost unique, since it is the
aggregation of the privileges granted by the
associated set of basic profiles, plus the user
customization. A corporate user profile update will
add, revoke or renew a given clearance, making the
user profile more than just a simple permissions file;
it also keeps a historical record of the privileges that
a user had, along with personalization and
characterization information.
3.3 User Profile Storage
Each user profile and each basic profile is stored in
an XML file. As mentioned, the user can only alter
part of his profile, being the organization responsible
for altering the remaining information. Typically,
there are two types of user profile updating: direct
and indirect updating:
 Direct updating – occurs when an organization
formal process updates a specific user profile
(revoking permissions or issuing clearances);
when the user makes changes to his profile;
when the application or service update the
user’s profile;
 Indirect updating – occurs when an
organization formal process updates a basic
profile (changing security, adding or removing
clearances). When this process occurs, it’s
necessary to access all the user profiles that
have the basic profile active and act
accordingly with the new basic profile
definition.
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The indirect updating may seem complicated, but
it eases profile information retrieval, since we can
guarantee that the profile is up to date with the
organization specifications.
Our user profile approach relies heavily on the
existing information model of the organization in
which it’s applied. We need a formal process to
indicate from which basic profile (or profiles) the
user profile will be generated. Even after creation,
formal processes may update the user profile as
needed. In our case study, project Contact@UA uses
Universidade de Aveiro active directory and a set of
additional services to provide the formal processes.
However, this may not be the case in other
organizations where this approach could be used (the
information system may not be based on Active
Directory; the formal processes may be entirely
manual;…). Therefore, and following considerations
in (Alfred & Josef, 2006; Judy, Bob, & Piers, 2002),
the user profile system is completely autonomous
from the organization information system and from
its technology.
3.4 Profile Management System
The UMS server approach needs an Active
Directory working underneath. Our approach was to
minimize the amount of extra software requirements
need to put the user modelling server to work.
The development of the Profile Management
System permitted exactly that; the system is
completely independent of any architecture or
software already in place and is fairly easy to
interoperate.
The profile server enables any kind of operation
in a user profile or in a basic profile by means of
web-services. Even query operations in the entire
system are supported, facilitating tasks like user
scrutiny and control (Judy, Bob, & Piers, 2002).
Stereotype reasoning (Pohl, 2001), or in this case,
profile updating is another important aspect,
controlled by the Profile Management System and
activated by a formal process within the
organization.
Operations like creating and editing basic
profiles are restricted to authorized users. It is up to
them to devise what users can access and by which
formal process.
4 USER MODELING SYSTEM
COMPARISON
Table 1 enumerates the major differences between
user modelling as defined in current state of the art
and our organizational user model approach:
Unlike the individual user model (as defined in
state of the art), the user profile can in some
circumstances be similar to several users (discarding
the customizations). Two employees in the same
work area, or two students enrolled in the same
course can be such an example. However, we
believe this is not a weakness in the system, since
the main purpose is to deliver the right organization
information to the right users. Even with the exact
basic profiles in their user profile, the information
can be personal within the service, making it unique.
Even so, the proposed model enables the creation of
very specific basic profiles, maximizing granularity
according to the needs of the organization business
model.
Table 1: Major differences between the proposed approach and the current state of the art.
State of the art user modeling Organizational user model approach
Structure of
characteristics set
Mostly unstructured Inheritable
Main characteristics on
each set
• Needs
• Goals
• knowledge and
• interests
Transactional templates; security rules and
layout templates, defined by profile
components:
• what the user can do
• where information is seen
Profile creation and
reasoning
Mostly trigger based Based on a formal process
User features description
Prediction profile part Basic profile
Profile update
Usually only user profile update is
considered;
Stereotype updates unnecessarily
related with user profile updates
Direct updating: user profile update
Indirect updating: basic profile update that
reflects on user profile
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5 CONCLUSIONS
This user model system was developed for use in
project Contact@UA and is in production stage
since December 2006. Currently we have about 10
basic profiles and 3500 user profiles which represent
about 25% of the active university population
(www.ua.pt, 2007). The number of basic profiles is
low considering the number of active profiles, but
10% of the registered users visit the site daily, so we
believe that the solution presented is valid from the
user model point of view. Even so, 10% of visitors
daily is a small number. We believe that this can be
raised by increasing the system granularity (building
more specific basic profiles, with even more
accurate information for users).
The process of profile updating and retrieval has
proven to be adequate to system needs. The Profile
Management System is an application independent
user model server that can be used to extract, insert
and update user characteristics, on a user basis or on
group basis, by the profile owner, the application
using the profile or the organization to which the
user belongs. Being an independent user modelling
system built as a black box and having a single
interface between the application and the user model
server, it eases both application upgrades and user
model upgrades without compromising the entire
system.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The project Contact@UA was supported by program
Aveiro–Digital 2003-2006.
This research is financed by the Portuguese
Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)
under the FCT fellowship SFRH/BD/30081/2006.
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