There is a growing interest in providing technology-mediated lifelong learning services (LLL) for ALL. Although an increasing number of the users interested in these services are adult learners and people with disabilities most available settings do not consider functional diversity requirements. Moreover, it is a hot research issue how to acquire, update and manage user models that consider the functional diversity of users so that their accessibility needs are met.
On the one hand, user modelling is supposed to provide the appropriate content transformations and adapted resources to users' needs when available. On the other hand, contents are supposed to follow Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0), which version 2.0 of these guidelines is near completion. Moreover, users access contents and services with a variety of devices and with different interaction modes that should consider personal characteristics (including disabilities) and the context of usage.
In addition, to make this framework interoperable, flexible and extensible, contents, user models and device descriptions should be standardized. In this respect, available specifications, such as IMS AccessForAll Specifications are currently being adopted within an ISO standard under development in that organisation's committee know as JTC1 SC34. There has also been work towards profiling the AccessForAll metadata to the IEEE LOM - Learning Object Metadata standard and the Dublin Core (DCMI) metadata set.
Several points of the UM'07 conference are to addressed, such as:
- Security and privacy aspects in the management of user data
- Evaluation of user modelling techniques and applications
- User adaptation and usability
- Knowledge representation and reasoning for user models
- User modelling in mobile, ubiquitous and context-aware computing
- User modelling for multimodal interactions
- Applications of user modelling systems and techniques
- Data mining and machine learning for user modelling
- Adaptation for people with disabilities and the elderly
- Adaptive hypermedia and Web systems
- Intelligent information retrieval, information filtering and content personalization
- Collaborative filtering and recommender systems
- Student modeling and adaptive learning environments
- Group modeling and adaptive support of collaboration
