COBBER: Ontology based model for Human-Centered Computing

Producing software in a globalized economy must take into account the multiplicity of humankind, which affects drastically the goal of reaching a wider audience. In this paper we describe COBBER, a domain-independent model for supporting Human Centered Computing issues, which takes into account the psychological and cognitive issues of users when interacting with the model. The main goal of the model is to keep users in an adequate mood during the conversation session with the computer. If users feel comfortable with the computer, then they continue working with it. We divide the model into two parts: a static personalization managing the users' outside-by personalizing operative systems and current running program aspects-and a dynamic adaptation-exchanging conversation strategies based on suggestions and inducing questions. We define ontologies as the concept and relation skeletons to represent extra knowledge for these tasks. The experiments are performed with two implementations and users show an optimistic perspective.