Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A Review and Analysis of Commercial User Modeling Servers for Personalization on the World Wide Web

  • Published:
User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

The aim of this article is to present and discuss selected commercial user modeling systems against the background of deployment requirements in real-world environments. Following the recent trend towards personalization on the World Wide Web, these systems are mainly aimed at supporting e-commerce including customer relationship management. In order to guide and structure our review, we define a requirements catalogue that comprises the main dimensions of functionality, data acquisition, representation, extensibility and flexibility, integration of external user-related information, compliance with standards, concern for privacy, and system architecture. Apart from the novelty of such a comparison both inside and outside the classical user modeling literature, a presentation of the core features of these commercial systems may provide a source of information and inspiration for the design, implementation, and deployment of future user modeling systems in research and commercial environments.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  • Ito1web: 2000, One-to-One Web Marketing Online. http://www.1to1web.com.

  • Åberg, J. and Shahmehri, N.: 1999, Web assistants: Towards an intelligent and personal web shop. Proceedings of Second Workshop on Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the World Wide Web at WWW-8, Toronto, Canada, and UM-99, Banff, Canada, pp. 5-12. http://www.contrib.andrew.cmu.edu/~plb/WWWUM99_workshop/aberg/aberg.html

  • Abrams, C., Bernstein, M., deSisto, R., Drobik, A. and Herschel, G.: 1999, E-Business: The Business Tsunami. Proceedings of Gartner Group Symposium/ITxpo, Cannes, France.

  • Accrue: 2000, Accrue Software. http://www.accrue.com

  • Allaire: 2000, ColdFusion. Allaire. http://www.allaire.com/Products/ColdFusion

  • Allen, C., Kania, D. and Yaeckel, B.: 1998, Internet World Guide to One-To-One Web Marketing. New York (NY): John Wiley and Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alspector, J., Kolcz, A. and Karunanithi, N.: 1997, Feature-based and Clique-based user models for movie selection: a comparative study. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 7(4), 279-304.

    Google Scholar 

  • Amazon: 2000, Your Privacy. Amazon.com. http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/subst/misc/policy/privacy.html

  • Ambrosini, L., Cirillo, V. and Micarelli, A.: 1997, A hybrid architecture for user-adapted information ¢ltering on the world-wide web. In: A. Jameson, C. Paris and C. Tasso (eds.), User Modeling: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer. 59-61. http://www.um.org/um_97/gz/AmbrosiniL.ps.gz

    Google Scholar 

  • Angoss: 2000, Angoss Software. http://www.angoss.com

  • Appian: 2000a, Appian. http://www.appiancorp.com

  • Appian: 2000b, Appian Web Personalization Report. Appian. http://www.appiancorp.com/awpr.asp

  • Ardissono, L. and Goy, A.: 1999, Tailoring the interaction with users in electronic shops. In: J. Kay (ed.), UM99 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer, 35-44. http://www.um.org/um_99/Proc/ardissono.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Ardissono, L., Goy, A., Meo, R. and Petrone, G.: 1999, A configurable system for the construction of adaptive virtual stores. World Wide Web 2(3), 143-159.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ardissono, L. and Goy, A.: 2000, Tailoring the Interaction with Users in Web Stores. Submitted.

  • ATG: 2000, Dynamo Product Suite. Art Technology Group. http://www.atg.com/products/highlights

  • Autonomy: 2000, Autonomy Systems. http://www.autonomy.com

  • Bachem, C.: 1999, ProfilgestÏtztes Online Marketing. In: S. Tjoa (ed.), Personalisierung im E-Commerce. Hamburg, Germany, Section 13.

  • Barnea, G.: 1999, Intelligent Agent Communities. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/downloads/intlagnt.zip

  • Bertram, F.: 2000, VerBose-Verteilte Architektur fÏr Benutzermodellierungssysteme. Master Thesis, Dept. of Computer Science, University of Koblenz-Landau, Germany.

    Google Scholar 

  • Billsus, D. and Pazzani, M.: 2000, User modeling for adaptive news access. 10, 147-180 (this issue).

    Google Scholar 

  • Blaze: 2000, Blaze Software. http://www.blazesoftware.com

  • Blue Martini: 2000, Blue Martini Software. http://www.bluemartini.com

  • Bowne: 2000, Bowne & Co. http://www.bowne.com

  • Brajnik, G. and Tasso, C.: 1994, A shell for developing non-monotonic user modeling systems. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 40, 31-62.

    Google Scholar 

  • Breese, J., Heckerman, D. and Kadie, C.: 1998, Empirical analysis of predictive algorithms for collaborative filtering. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-98). San Francisco (CA): Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 43-52.

    Google Scholar 

  • BroadVision: 2000, BroadVision. http://www.broadvision.com

  • Brusilovsky, P., Kobsa, A. and Vassileva, J. (eds.): 1998, Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

    Google Scholar 

  • BusinessWeek: 1999, Global 1000. BusinessWeek online. http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_28/g1000.htm

  • Cadez, I., Heckerman, D., Meek, C., Smyth, P. and White, S.: 2000, Visualization of navigation patterns on a Web site using model-based clustering. Proceedings of the Sixth ACM Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. Boston (MA), forthcoming.

  • Caglayan, A. and Snorrason, M.: 1993, On the relationship between generalized equality clustering and ART 2 neural networks. World Congress on Neural Networks. Portland (OR), July 1993.

  • Caglayan, A., Snorrason, M., Jacoby, J., Mazzu, J., Jones, R. and Kumar, K.: 1997, Learn Sesame–a Learning Agent Engine. Applied Artificial Intelligence 11, 393-412.

    Google Scholar 

  • Conklin, J.: 1987, Hypertext: An Introduction and Survey. IEEE Computer September 1987, pp. 17-41.

  • Cooperstein, D., Delhagen, K., Aber, A. and Levin, K.: 1999, Making Net Shoppers Loyal. Cambridge (MA): Forrester Research.

    Google Scholar 

  • DMA: 2000, Direct Marketing Association. http://www.the-dma.org

  • Eklund, J. and Brusilovsky, P.: 1998, The value of adaptivity in hypermedia learning environments: a short review of empirical evidence. In: P. Brusilovsky and P. De Bra (eds.), Proceedings of Second Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia Workshop at the Ninth ACM International Hypertext Conference Hypertext '98. Pittsburgh (PA), pp. 11-17. http://wwwis.win.tue.nl/ah98/Eklund.html

  • EPIC: 2000, Electronic Privacy Information Center. http://www.epic.org

  • Finin, T. W.: 1989, GUMS: A general user modeling shell. In: A. Kobsa and W. Wahlster, (eds.), User Models in Dialog Systems. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer. 411-430.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fink, J., Kobsa, A., and Nill, A.: 1998, Adaptable and adaptive information provision for all users, including disabled and elderly people. The New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia 4, 163-188.

    Google Scholar 

  • Fink, J.: 2001, UserModeling Servers-Requirements, Design, and Implementation. Doctoral Dissertation, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Essen, Germany (forthcoming).

    Google Scholar 

  • Forrester: 2000, Forrester Research. http://www.forrester.com

  • FTC: 2000, Federal Trade Commission. http://www.ftc.gov

  • Fuller, R. and de Graaf, J.: 1996, Measuring User Motivation from Server Log Files. In: Proceedings of the Microsoft Conference Designing for the Web-Empirical Studies, Redmond (WA). http://www.microsoft.com/usability/webconf/fuller/fuller.htm

  • Good, N., Schafer, J., Konstan, J., Borchers, A., Sarwar, B., Herlocker, J. and Riedl, J.: 1999, Combining collaborative ¢ltering with personal agents for better recommendations. In: Proceedings of the 1999 Conference of the American Association of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-99), 439-446. http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/aaai-99.pdf

  • Goscinski, A.: 1991, Distributed Operating Systems: The Logical Design. Sydney: Addison-Wesley.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gustos: 2000, Gustos Software. http://www.gustos.com

  • Hagen, P., Manning, H. and Souza, R.: 1999, Smart Personalization. Cambridge (MA): Forrester Research.

    Google Scholar 

  • Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., Borchers, A. and Riedl, J.: 1999, An algorithmic framework for performing collaborative filtering. In: M. Hearst, F. Gey and R. Tong (eds.), Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. New York (NY): ACM. 230-237. http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/algs.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • HNC: 2000 Software. http://www.hnc.com

  • Hof, R., Green, H. and Himmelstein, L.: 1998, Now it's YOUR WEB. Business Week, October 5: 68-74.

  • Howes, T. and Smith, M.: 1997, Ldap: Programming Directory-Enabled Applications with Lightweight Directory Access Protocol. Indianapolis (IN): Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Howes, T., Smith, M. and Good, G.: 1999, Understanding and deploying LDAP directory services. London: Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • IBM: 2000, IBM Net.Commerce. IBM. http://www-4.ibm.com/software/webservers/commerce/servers

  • ICONOCAST: 1999, More concentrated than the leading brand. ICONOCAST. http://www.iconocast.com/icono-archive/icono.102199.html

  • iPlanet: 2000, iPlanet Directory and Security Services. Sun-Netscape Alliance. http://www.iplanet.com/products/infrastructure/dir_security/index.html

  • Jörding: 2000, Short-term user modeling for adaptive product presentations on the World Wide Web. Submitted.

  • Jupiter: 2000, Jupiter Communications. http://www.jup.com

  • Kay, J.: 1995, The um toolkit for reusable, long term user models. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 4(3), 149-196.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kobsa, A., Müller, D. and Nill, A.: 1994, KN-AHS: An adaptive hypertext client of the user modeling system BGP-MS. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on User Modeling. Hyannis (MA), pp. 99-105. Reprinted in M. Maybury and W. Wahlster (eds.): 1998, Intelligent User Interfaces. SanMateo (CA):MorganKaufman. pp. 372-378. http://ics.uci.edu/_kobsa/papers/1994-UM94-kobsa.ps

  • Kobsa, A. and Pohl, W.: 1995, The user modeling shell system BGP-MS. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 4(2), 59-106.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kobsa, A.: 2001, Generic user modeling systems. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 11(1), 10 Year Anniversary Issue.

  • Kobsa, A., Koenemann, J. and Pohl, W.: 2001, Personalized hypermedia presentation techniques for improving customer relationships. To appear in The Knowledge Engineering Review. http://ics.uci.edu/_kobsa/papers/Kobsa-PHPT-draft.pdf

  • Konstan, J., Miller, B., Maltz, D., Herlocker, J., Gordon, L. and Riedl, J.: 1997, GroupLens: Applying collaborative filtering to Usenet News. Communications of the ACM 40(3), 77-87. http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/journals/cacm/1997-40-3/p77-konstan

    Google Scholar 

  • Kristol, D. and Montulli, L.: 1997, HTTP State Management Mechanism. ftp://ftp.isi.edu/in-notes/rfc2109.txt

  • Machado, I., Martins, A. and Paiva, A.: 1999, One for all and all in one: a learner modelling server in a multi-agent platform. In: J. Kay (ed.), UM99 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer, pp. 211-221. http://www.um.org/um_99/Proc/paiva.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Macromedia: 2000, LikeMinds. Macromedia. http://ebusiness.macromedia.com/products/likeminds/

  • Manna: 1999a, FrontMind for Marketing. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/downloads/fmwhite.zip

  • Manna: 1999b, Automated Distributed Intelligence. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/downloads/adiwhite.zip

  • Manna: 2000a, Manna. http://www.mannainc.com

  • Manna: 2000b, FrontMind. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/downloads/whitepaper.zip

  • Manna: 2000c, Online Personalization for E-commerce: The Manna Advantage. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/downloads/personalization.zip

  • Manna: 2000d, FrontMind Components. Manna. http://www.mannainc.com/products_stage_technical.html

  • Marketing 1to1: 2000, Marketing 1to1-Marketplace1to1. Peppers and Rogers Group. http://search.marketplace1to1.com

  • Microsoft: 2000, Product and Technology Catalog. Microsoft. http://www.microsoft.com/products

  • Moore, J. and Paris, C.: 1992, Exploiting user feedback to compensate for the unreliability of user models. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 2(4), 331-365.

    Google Scholar 

  • Net Perceptions: 2000, Net Perceptions. http://www.netperceptions.com

  • Netscape: 2000, Directory and LDAP Developer Central. Netscape. http://developer.netscape.com/tech/directory/index.html

  • Nielsen, J.: 1990, The Art of Navigating through Hypertext. Communications of the ACM 33(3): 296-310.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nielsen: 2000, Nielsen Media Research. http://www.nielsenmedia.com

  • Open Sesame 2000, Open Sesame. Bowne & Co. http://www.opensesame.com

  • Orfali, R., Harkey, D. and Edwards, J.: 1994, Essential Client/Server Survival Guide. New York (NY) and Singapore: Wiley and Sons.

    Google Scholar 

  • Orwant, J.: 1995, Heterogeneous learning in the Doppelgänger user modeling system. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 4(2), 107-130.

    Google Scholar 

  • Paliouras, G., Karkaletsis, V., Papatheodorou, C. and Spyropoulos, C.: 1999, Exploiting learning techniques for the acquisition of user stereotypes and communities. In: J. Kay (ed.), UM99 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer, pp. 169-178. http://www.um.org/um_99/Proc/karkaletsis.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Peppers, D. and Rogers, M.: 1993, The One to One Future: Building Relationships One Customer at a Time. New York (NY): Currency Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peppers, D. and Rogers, M.: 1997, Enterprise One to One: Tools for Competing in the Interactive Age. New York (NY): Currency Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Peppers, D., Rogers, M. and Dorf, B.: 1999, The One to One Fieldbook. New York (NY): Currency Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Personalization: 2000, personalization.com. http://www.personalization.com

  • Pohl, W. and Nick, A.: 1999, Machine learning and knowledge-based user modeling in the LaboUr approach. In: J. Kay (ed.), UM99 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer, 179-188. http://www.um.org/um_99/Proc/pohl.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Popp, H. and Lödel, D.: 1996, Fuzzy techniques and user modeling in sales assistants. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 5(3-4), 349-370.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reagle, J. and Cranor, L.: 1999, The platform for privacy preferences. Communications of the ACM 42(2), 48-55.

    Google Scholar 

  • Reichheld, F.: 1996, The Loyalty Effect. Boston (MA): Harvard Business School Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Sushak, M., Bergstrom, P. and Riedl, J.: 1994, GroupLens: An open architecture for collaborative filtering of Netnews. In: Proceedings of the Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work. pp. 175-186. http://www.acm.org/pubs/citations/proceedings/cscw/192844/p175-resnick/

  • Rich, E.: 1979, User modeling via stereotypes. Cognitive Science 3, 329-354.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rich, E.: 1983, Users are individuals: Individualizing user models. Journal of Man-Machine Studies 18, 199-214.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rich, E.: 1989, Stereotypes and user modeling. In: A. Kobsa and W. Wahlster (eds.), User Models in Dialog Systems. Berlin: Springer Verlag, pp. 35-51.

    Google Scholar 

  • RightPoint: 2000, RightPoint Software. http://www.rightpoint.com

  • Schafer, J., Konstan, J. and Riedl, J.: 1999, Recommender systems in electronic commerce. Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC-99). Denver (CO): ACM. pp. 158-166. http://www.cs.umn.edu/Research/GroupLens/ec-99.pdf

    Google Scholar 

  • Schreck, J.: 2000, Security Issues in User Modeling. Doctoral Dissertation, Dept. of Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Essen, Germany (forthcoming).

    Google Scholar 

  • Singh, J.: 2000, Privacy, Information, and Consumer Value. ART Technology Group. http://www.atg.com/news/white-papers/privacy.html

  • Snorrason, M. and Caglayan, A.: 1994, Generalized ART2 algorithms. World Congress on Neural Networks. San Diego (CA), June 1994.

  • Specht,.: 1998, Empirical evaluation of adaptive annotation in hypermedia. Proceedings of the ED-MEDIA98, Freiburg, Germany, pp. 1327-1332.

  • Specht, M. and Kobsa, A.: 1999, Interaction of domain expertise and interface design in adaptive educational hypermedia. Proceedings of the SecondWorkshop on Adaptive Sys-tems and User Modeling on the World Wide Web at WWW-8, Toronto, Canada, and UM-99, Banff, Canada, pp. 89-93. http://ics.uci.edu/_kobsa/papers/1999-WWW8UM99-kobsa.pdf

  • Spiliopoulou, M. and Faulstich, L.: 1999, A tool for web utilization analysis. In: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Web and Databases-WebDB'98. Berlin, Heidelberg: Springer, 184-203. http://www.dia.uniroma3.it/webdb98/papers/12.ps

    Google Scholar 

  • SUN: 2000, Java Technology Index. SUN Microsystems. http://www.sun.com/products-n-solutions/software/api/java.html

  • Tanenbaum, A.: 1992, Modern Operating Systems. Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice Hall.

    Google Scholar 

  • Truog, D., Bernoff, J., Ritter, T. and Goldman, H.: 1999, Centralize Access Control Now. Cambridge (MA): Forrester Research.

    Google Scholar 

  • TRUSTe: 2000, TRUSTe. http://www.truste.org

  • Vignette: 2000, Vignette. http://www.vignette.com

  • W3C: 2000, Platform for Privacy Preferences (P3P) Project. W3C. http://www.w3.org/P3P

  • Weber, G. and Specht, M.: 1997, User modeling and adaptive navigation support in WWW-based tutoring systems. In: A. Jameson, C. Paris and C. Tasso (eds.), User Modeling: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer. pp. 289-300. http://www.um.org/um_97/gz/WeberG.ps.gz

    Google Scholar 

  • Yimam, D. and Kobsa, A.: 2001, Expert finding systems for organizations: Problem and domain analysis and the DEMOIR approach. In M. Ackerman, A. Cohen, V. Pipek and V. Wulf, (eds.), Beyond Knowledge Management: Sharing Expertise. forthcoming

  • Zukerman, I., Albrecht, D. and Nicholson, A.: 1999, Predicting users' requests on the WWW. In: J. Kay (ed.), UM99 User Modeling: Proceedings of the Seventh International Con-ference. Wien, New York (NY): Springer, pp. 275-284. http://www.um.org/um_99/Proc/zukerman.pdf

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. humanIT Human Information Technologies GmbH, Rathausallee 10, 53754, Sankt Augustin, Germany

    Josef Fink

  2. Dept. of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, 92697-3425, U.S.A

    Alfred Kobsa

Authors
  1. Josef Fink
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Alfred Kobsa
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Fink, J., Kobsa, A. A Review and Analysis of Commercial User Modeling Servers for Personalization on the World Wide Web. User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction 10, 209–249 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026597308943

Download citation

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1026597308943

Search

Navigation