User Profiling - Concepts And Applications 

User profiling has gained stature as a standard tool in e-commerce as well as in other informational environments today. It helps in discovering each user’s pattern of usage, observing trends, and transforming these trends into benefits for end users, products and services. User profiling is a process of gathering all known information about the audience of a product, and then breaking it down into specific profiles. These profiles, or personas, can then be used when designing a product to ensure that the design will work for the intended audience. The purpose of user profiling is to capture the needs, goals, values, expectations and habits of users into well-defined user groups. User profiling seeks to investigate the information needs of the target audience, to help tailor the general portal for specific user groups. For a content-based site, this means that users can have pages automatically tailored to fit their perceived interests, and for e-commerce sites there is the ability to flash different special offers to different users, depending on, which products they are most likely to buy. This book aims to provide an insight into user profiling by providing a brief introduction to the concept, and its rising significance in today’s information empowered business environment. It also covers the general criteria for user profiling, tools and methodologies and application areas.