A User Context Management Approach for Query Personalization Settings

Data-oriented applications have experienced a huge growth mainly in distributed settings. The increasing amount of available data has made it hard for users to find the information they need in the way they consider relevant. To help matters, a user-centric approach may be used to enhance query answering and, particularly, provide query personalization. In this work, we address the issue of personalizing query answers in diverse settings taking into account the user context. We propose a user context management approach which includes a representational model (as an ontology) and a context-aware service named CODI4In. CODI4In provides the persistence and recovery of the manipulated user context. It has been developed as a plug in which may be coupled to any query answering system. In this paper, we present an initial version of the developed plug in coupled with a query answering application and some promising experimental results we have accomplished with real users.