Towards User Profile Meta-Ontology

With the rapid advancement of digital transformation, a large amount of data related to human activities is being gathered. Whilst knowing and understanding users is an essential activity for designing and evaluating interactive systems, describing users is a daunting task. This paper investigates the challenges for describing users’ profile and how using Ontology for creating and representing user profiles might be a suitable solution for ensuring interoperability and facilitating data federation. This paper proposes a solution in the form of a meta-ontology for user profiling and explores its creation, use, and effective federation. As we shall see, Ontology for describing users’ profile is not a new idea but it required an update to cope with the advent of new practices for collecting users’ data, the variety of attributes used nowadays to describe users, and the huge amount ammassed informaiton about user profiles.