Managing User Preferences for Personalization in a Pervasive Service Environment

The importance of personalization in many application areas is now well accepted and this is true of both telecommunications and web services. One important research area which spans telecommunications and web services is that of pervasive systems. Here the role of personalization is essential in order for a pervasive system to function effectively without the need for unnecessary interaction with the user and for improving the user experience by providing appropriate support for the actions taken by the user. However, in order to provide personalization in such a system the system needs to build up an adequate set of user preferences. This is a non-trivial task. This paper describes briefly the approaches to personalization included in the development of the pervasive system in the Daidalos project. It discusses some of the strategies involved in managing user preferences and the approaches being taken in the Daidalos system. In particular in the second phase a novel approach is proposed to deal with this problem.