Where to locate user profiles of personalized applications? A user profile management agent

This paper describes a user profile management agent on the World Wide Web. To help web users to get relevant information efficiently, various sites are providing personalized services and the number of such sites is rapidly increasing. However, deciding where to locate user profiles of personalized applications is a difficult problem. To date, there have been two solutions to this problem: storing user profiles on the server side or storing them on the client side, which is a terminal that runs a web browser. Both these methods have advantages and disadvantages. When the user profiles are stored on the server side, it is impossible for the users to use the same profiles to access other personalized servers. When they are stored on the client side, it is difficult for the server to compare different users profiles and to provide a so-called collaborative filtering service. Our method solves these problems by storing the user profiles on an agent. The agent keeps the user profiles of a group of users and mediates the communications between the users and personalized servers. When a server requests a user profile, the agent gives it to the server. When a user profile needs to be updated, it is done so on the agent. This agent not only discharges the personalized servers from the user profile management tasks but also gives users the possibility of getting new functions such as collaborative filtering using their own user profiles. We have implemented the user profile management agent as an extended proxy server of the web and have demonstrated that the proxy server is useful for sharing user profiles both between different personalized servers and between different users.