User identification for cross-system personalisation

Currently, there is an increasing demand for user-adaptive systems for various purposes in many different domains. Typically, personalisation in information systems occurs separately within each system. The recent trends in user modeling rely on cross-system personalisation, i.e., the opportunity to share information across multiple information systems in order to improve user adaptation. Cooperation among systems in order to exchange user model knowledge is a complex task. This paper addresses a key challenge for cross-system personalisation which is often taken as a starting assumption, i.e., user identification. In this paper, we describe the conceptualization and implementation of a framework that provides a common base for user identification for cross-system personalisation among web-based user-adaptive systems. However, the framework can be easily adopted in different working environments and for different purposes. The framework represents a hybrid approach which draws parallels both from centralized and decentralized solutions for user modeling. To perform user identification, we propose to exploit a set of identification properties that are combined using an identification algorithm. © 2008 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.