Research on life-cycle of user model in U-Business

“U-Business” is a novel type business environment, which can provide various services via many mobile devices. In order to provide personalized service to different users, user model (UM) can play an important role in U-Business. UM reflects some characteristics of users to a certain degree, which is used widely in U-Business, like personalized recommendation, social computing, information retrieval services, and so on. Currently, there are more and more researchers who focus on the building and update of UM based on the activities of people. However, as too many UM appeared, the number of UM in cyber space is increasingly large, which takes a lot of space and cost. Furthermore, after some users disappear in the physic world, their models are still working in the cyber world. This case is not reasonable obviously, but few researches take care about it. Therefore, one of important issues, the death of UM should be taken into account in the whole life-cycle of user model. This paper proposes a specific user modeling method for the Cyber Individuals (Cyber-I) in U-Business. The essential difference between this UM and traditional ones is that it has a life, that is, birth, growth, and demise, like a life-cycle of Cyber-I. Specially, the significance of UM life ending and five states of UM death are described from an organic viewpoint. In addition, there is a framework of the whole life process of UM. Finally, the proposed idea is applied to the field of personalized service.