A generic component for exchanging user models between web-based systems

Educational web-based systems exemplify the increasing need for personalisation. Applications that adapt to individual users need a model of the user that contains as accurate data as possible. On the web, learners use multiple educational systems and spend their time over many applications: these are individually limited in their user modelling but can gain from joining forces. This boils down to establishing semantic interoperability of user or learner models. While semantic interoperability is hard, the emerging Semantic Web (SW) might offer just the mechanisms we need. In this paper, we develop the Generic User model Component (GUC): a generic software that utilises SW technology to support the exchange of user model data between applications. For a semantically effective user model exchange, GUC allows the configuration of a distributed management of mappings between user models. Thus, applications can choose different levels of uniting user models to maximise their personalisation.