Patent ID: 7650342

Claim:
A management device for collecting user profiles from a user terminal, the management device being connected to the user terminal in which one or more applications operate and create the user profiles, the management device comprising: a determination criteria storing means for storing one or more user situation determination criteria for determining a user situation; a collecting means for collecting and storing the user profiles created by the one or more applications; a request accepting means for accepting a request for a comprehensive user profile from any of the one or more applications; a user situation managing means for determining, in response to the request for the comprehensive user profile, a current user situation based on the user situation determination criteria; a creating means for, in response to the request for the comprehensive user profile, extracting, from the user profiles stored in the collecting means, one or more user profiles relating to the current user situation determined by the user situation managing means and creating the comprehensive user profile of the current user situation based on the one or more extracted user profiles relating to the current user situation; and a transmitting means for transmitting the comprehensive user profile created by the creating means to the one or more applications, wherein the user situation managing means further stores a relevance level table that defines a level of relevance between determined user situations, and wherein, in response to the request for the comprehensive user profile, the creating means: specifies, from the relevance level table, a related user situation other than the current user situation and related to the current user situation; extracts, from the user profiles stored in the collecting means, one or more user profiles relating to the specified related user situation in addition to the extracted one or more user profiles relating to the current user situation; weights (i) the extracted one or more user profiles relating to the specified related user situation and (ii) the extracted one or more user profiles relating to the current user situation, based on the level of relevance, indicated by the relevance level table, between the current user situation and the related user situation; and creates the comprehensive user profile based on each of the weighted user profiles.