Adaptive User Profiles for Enterprise Information Access

A major challenge for users of enterprise information is finding the information they want, presented in a way that makes sense to them. In this paper we tackle this problem by creating adaptive user profiles from implicit behaviour. In traditional approaches to information filtering, the user has to explicitly create his or her profile, and manually keep the profile up to date. Taking advantage of the popularity of collaborative tagging systems, we use the recorded tagging behaviour to construct an implicit, yet realistic and dynamic user profile. We present and evaluate algorithms for creating such profiles, characterizing their behaviour through statistical analysis. In addition, we present a visualisation tool which was used in a small scale user study to provide insight as to the effectiveness of our approach. Finally, we show how the profiles can be leveraged to enable personalised access to enterprise data sources.