From User Models to the Cyber-I Model: Approaches, Progresses and Issues

A user model is a collection and categorization of personal data associated with a specific user. With the development of personal computers, the usage of the user model has been evolving in the past 40 years. In the early age of the computer, as a part of computer application, one user model could only be used for a single domain, such as the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and the education support. With the increase of many different applications, a user model was separated from its specific computer application to support the cross-domain usage for multiple applications. The emergence of the Internet made the user model to be the users' specific representation on a single social platform for the identification by other users. In the foreseeable future, the user model will become a common representation for its user via multiple social platforms. Theoretically, a unique, digital, comprehensive description of every human individual, namely Cyber Individual (Cyber-I) may exist on the Internet. In this paper, we first focus on approaches to build up the Cyber-I model in comparison to the user model, in terms of model representations, architectures of modeling system and modeling techniques. We then summarize our previous works related to Cyber-I modeling, e.g., the personal data collection, the Cyber-I modeling architecture, and the modeling process. Finally, we present major issues that should be solved for the future development of Cyber-I model and modeling.