Personalisation project produces middleware demonstrators

As part of the JISC-funded work on personalisation, EDINA has been investigating and developing two demonstrators, both shared middleware:

MyGeo, a location service for third-party services to query and set users' location preferences. These preferences can then be exploited by other service providers in order to personalise their own services.
CRIS, a knowledge-base of user comments and references to service content that might support personalisation actions by services into the JISC IE.

MyGeo provides a proof-of-concept middleware service for storing information about a user's location. Other services and devices can either update that information or access it. By helping applications use location more effectively, MyGeo supports service personalisation by making search and discovery of resources more locally aware and relevant.

CRIS - short for "Commenting and Referencing Infrastructure Service" - demonstrates a reference linking shared middleware service, with a focus on multimedia resources. A service such as this would help service providers avoid duplicating implementation of the functionality in individual services. Data aggregation beyond the usage of any one of the JISC services will provide a critical mass to support analysis on which, say, recommender functionality could be based.

Personalisation project summary