Call for papers
MultiA-Pro: International Workshop on Interoperability of User Profiles in Multi-Application Web Environments

In conjunction with the WWW2012 Conference, April the 16th 2012, Lyon, France

Workshop webpage: http://liris.cnrs.fr/multiapro2012/
Organizers:
Shlomo Berkovsky, CSIRO, Australia
Elöd Egyed-Zsigmond, Université de Lyon, France
Geert-Jan Houben, TU Delft, the Netherlands

Objective
Nowadays, many different web sites and applications in different areas (e-learning, digital libraries, search engines, e-commerce, social networks, ubiquitous computing, web of things) are gathering proprietary user profiles. These are gathered for the purpose of the subsequent provision of adaptive and personalized services to users.
Although beneficial and having the potential to upgrade the personalized services provided to users, very little exchange of the gathered user profile information practically occurs between these sites and applications. This can be explained by various commercial and legal limitations. Firstly, commercial competition between companies prevents them from sharing the gathered user profiles. For example, e-commerce services like Amazon and eBay are primarily interested to improve their own service and refrain from establishing an interoperable environment and sharing their own profiles with the rival service. Secondly, many countries impose very stringent legal restrictions on the gathering and storage of personal user information and prohibit such a sharing. Meanwhile, for individual users, it is getting more and more difficult to manage in a secure and practical way their ever multiplying web identities.
Overcoming these limitations and developing solutions and standards for multi-application user profiling and interoperability of user modeling and personalization applications is timely and important. This can allow future online service providers to gather richer and more accurate user profiles, and, as a result, facilitate the provision of high-quality personalized services to their users. Providing a standardized, transparent, user centric and secured means for gathering, modeling, and management of user profiles would facilitate the adoption of user profile data interoperability and sharing in web based user modeling and personalization applications.
The aim of this workshop is to organize a common discussion among scientific and industrial research communities on the challenges evolving around multi-application user profiling and personalization on the web. The main objective is to set new standards and a strategic research agenda for researchers and web technology developers for aspects related to interoperability of user modeling and personalization systems.

The workshop will focus on 2 topics:
1. User profiling in multi-application web environments. This includes sub-topics, such as acquisition of ubiquitous and context-aware user models; user profiling in intelligent environments; user profiling across web-sites and web-services ; user profiling in social applications ; user profiling across application domains ; privacy, security and trust in multi-application user profiling.
2. User profile integration. This includes topics, such as overcoming syntactic and semantic heterogeneity; conflict resolution; inference with user and context models; spatial and temporal reasoning; semantic approaches and ontologies for user profile integration; personalized services using the integrated profiles.

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
Multi-application user modeling,
Web user modeling in social networks
Web user modeling for e-learning
Web user profile representation
Web user profile evolution
Web user data collection
Web identity management
Personalized search and data sharing across communities
Personalized and contextualized information retrieval
Privacy and anonymity in web user profiling,
Semantic approaches for multi-application user profiling
Users' reliability and trust in open communities

The submitted papers will be evaluated by the Program Committee. Accepted papers will be referenced by the WWW Conference commettee and selected papers will be prpbably published in a journal.

Potential program committee:

Fabian Abel, TU Delft, the Netherlands
Lora Aroyo, Free University, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Nadia Bennani, Université de Lyon, France
Mohand Boughanem, IRIT Toulouse, France
Peter Brusilovsky, Univ. of Pittsburgh, USA
Sylvie Calabretto, Université de Lyon, France
Max Chevalier, IRIT Toulouse, France
Ernesto Damiani, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Paul De Bra, Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands
Vania Dimitrova, Univ. Leeds, UK
Jill Freyne, CSIRO, Australia
Cristina Gena, Univ. Of Torino, Italy
Dick Hardt, USA
Stéphanie Jean-Daubias, Université de Lyon, France
Jérome Jensel, LIG, Grenoble, France
Judy Kay, Univ. of Sydney
Alfred Kobsa, Univ. of California Irvine, USA
Philippe Lopisteguy, IUT Bayonne, France
Bhaskar Mehta, Google, ?
Salma Noor, University of Southampton, UK
Henning Olesen, Aalborg University Copenhagen, Denmark
Aris M. Ouksel, The University of Illinois, USA
Carsten Rust, Morpho, Germany
Johann Stan, Alcatel-Lucent Bell Labs, France
Lynda Tamine, IRIT Toulouse, France
Marco Viviani, Università degli Studi dell'Insubria, Italy
Gottfried Zimmermann, University of Tübingen, Germany


Important Dates:
Workshop paper submissions: February 6, 2012
Notification of Workshop paper acceptance: February 27, 2012
Camera ready paper due: March 5, 2012
Workshop: April 16, 2012

Submission Guidelines:
All submissions must be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings Template (http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) . Papers are limited to 10 pages!
Workshop Paper Submissions
Submit your paper here: http://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=multiapro2012