Process of Concept Alignment for Interoperability between Heterogeneous Sources

Some researchers in the community of user modeling envision the need to share and reuse information scattered over different user models of heterogeneous sources. In a multi-application environment each application and service must repeat the effort of building a user model to obtain just a narrow understanding of the user. Sharing and reusing information between models can prevent the user from repeated configurations, help deal with application and services’ “cold start” problem, and provide enrichment to user models to obtain a better understanding of the user. But gathering distributed user information from heterogeneous sources to achieve user models interoperability implies handling syntactic and semantic heterogeneity. In this paper, we present a process of concept alignment to automatically determine semantic mapping relations that enable the interoperability between heterogeneous profile suppliers and consumers, given the mediation of a central ubiquitous user model. We show that the process of concept alignment for interoperability based in a two-tier matching strategy can allow the interoperability between social networking applications, FOAF, Personal Health Records (PHR) and personal devices.