Extraction of user profile based on workflow and information flow

A collaborative team usually consists of team members with various domains. These members' demands for knowledge are also different from each other. For recommending potentially useful knowledge to suitable members, their user profiles should be well managed and maintained. User profile can be input by the members, but a more intelligent way should be the automatic extraction of the user profiles. Workflow and information flow are two types of collaborative processes, which exist behind every collaborative team. This paper is mainly concerned with how to extract these team members' user profile from the two types of contexts: workflow and information flow. This paper defines a model for the user profile. Then some methods are proposed for extracting the profile information on the basis of workflow and information flow. This study on the user profile extraction can pave the way for developing knowledge recommender systems, which can recommend proper knowledge to proper team members with a collaborative team. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.