Compass to Locate the User Model I Need: Building the Bridge between Researchers and Practitioners in User Modeling

User modeling is a complex task, and many user modeling techniques are proposed in the existing literature, but the way these models are presented is not homogeneous, the domain is fragmented and these models are not directly comparable. Thus there is a need for a unified view of the whole user modeling domain and of the applicability of the models to specific applications, contexts or according to specific requirements, type of data, availability of data, etc. A common question companies may ask when they want to build and exploit a user model in order to implement different kinds of personalization or adaptive systems is: “Given my specific requirements, which user modeling technique can be used?”. No obvious answer can be given to this question. This article aims to propose a topic map of user modeling in connection with input data, data types, accessibility, approach, specific requirements and users’ data acquisition methods. This schema/topic map is aimed to help practitioners and researchers as well to answer the above mentioned question. Furthermore the article provides two concrete scenarios in the area of recommender systems and shows how the topic map may be used for these scenarios and real world applications.