title: Supporting global user profiles through trusted authorities
abstract: Personalization generally refers to making a Web site more responsive to the unique and individual needs of each user. We argue that for personalization to work effectively, detailed and interoperable user profiles should be globally available for authorized sites, and these profiles should dynamically reflect changes in user interests. Creating user profiles from user click-stream data seems to be an effective way of generating detailed and dynamic user profiles. However, a user profile generated in this way is available only on the computer where the user accesses his browser, and is inaccessible when the same user works on a different computer. On the other hand, integration of the Internet with telecommunication networks has made it possible for the users to connect to the Web with a variety of mobile devices as well as desktops. This requires that user profiles should be available to any desktop or mobile device on the Internet that users choose to work with. In this paper, we address these problems through the concept of "trusted authority". A user agent at the client side that captures the user click stream, dynamically generates a navigational history 'log' file in Extensible Markup Language (XML). This log file is then used to produce 'user profiles' in a resource description framework (RDF). A user's right to privacy is provided through the Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) standard. User profiles are uploaded to the trusted authority and served next time the user connects to the Web
keyphrases: global user profiles trusted authorities personalization Web site Internet telecommunication networks mobile device user agent user click stream XML resource description framework privacy navigational history log file Platform for Privacy Preferences standard namespace qualifier globally unique user ID/password identification