Alter Ego: State of the art on user profiling

Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from or via Telematica Instituut S yn o p s is: This report gives an overview of the most relevant organisational and behavioural aspects regarding user profiling. It discusses not only the most important aims of user profiling from both an organisation's as well as a user's perspective, it will also discuss organisational motives and barriers for user profiling and the most important conditions for the success of user profiling. Finally recommendations are made and suggestions for further research are given. 1. A user profile is a (structured) data record, containing user-related information including identifiers, characteristics, abilities, needs and interests, preferences, traits, and previous behaviour in contexts that are relevant to predicting and influencing future behaviour. 2. User profiles are created, maintained and updated in a cooperative process between organisations and users of the organisational ICT applications, such as clients, customers and citizens. 3. User profiles can be used in order to realise three organisational aims: a. Making the communication between organisation and user more efficient and effective; b. In addition to making the communication more efficient and effective, predicting the behaviour of users; c. In addition to making the communication more efficient and effective and on the basis of predicted user behaviour, influencing users in order to make them demonstrate desired behaviour. 4. User profiling must have a demonstrable, measurable return on investment for organisations. The organisation must be able to prove to itself that user profiling helps to achieve its goals better, or that it helps to communicate and interact with users in a more efficient and effective way. 5. Any discrepancy between organisational goals and user interests will reduce the users' acceptance of the user profile system. If the users perceive a good balance between their interests and the organisations' aims, they will accept user profiling more readily. 6. Private and commercial organisations have more and broader experience with applying user-related information for segmentation, tailoring and personalisation than public and governmental organisations. 7. User profiling is particularly beneficial to public and private organisations which distribute and process large amounts of administrative and form-based communication (such as the Belastingdienst, healthcare organisations, …