=Paper=
{{Paper
|id=None
|storemode=property
|title=Towards using Wikipedia for Building User Identities
|pdfUrl=https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1064/identities.pdf
|volume=Vol-1064
|dblpUrl=https://dblp.org/rec/conf/semweb/FilipowskaM13
}}
==Towards using Wikipedia for Building User Identities==
https://ceur-ws.org/Vol-1064/identities.pdf
Towards using DBpedia for building user
identities
Agata Filipowska and Jacek Malyszko
Poznan University of Economics
Faculty of Informatics and Electronic Economy
Department of Information Systems
Al. Niepodleglosci 10, 61-875 Poznan, Poland
{firstname.lastname}@kie.ue.poznan.pl,
http://www.kie.ue.poznan.pl
Abstract. Internet offers a number of various services that to maximise
the user experience apply different personalisation techniques. An impor-
tant resource of every personalisation method is a user profile. The more
information on the user is available in such profile, the better. There-
fore, together with maturing of these mechanisms, the notion of identity
emerged. The identity exceeds the user profile with information that is
more detailed or enables benefiting from additional functionalities. The
information stored within an identity needs to be understandable for
different services to be easily reused. This can be achieved using the
DBpedia.
The goal of the article is to describe the design of a method that po-
tentially enables providing data to build the user identity, based on his
behaviour on the Web. The method is elaborated as well as an example
of application is presented.
Keywords: DBpedia, Wikipedia, information extraction, identity
1 Introduction
Most users leave a significant amount of information about themselves on the
Web. They abandon their anonymity freely (sometimes unconsciously), in order
to stay connected with their friends on the social networking sites, communicate
with their government or build their reputation [1], [9]. Also, the service providers
want to learn detailed characteristics of their users by using different profiling
practices [5], in order to provide a better service and preserve their customers.
As a result of these trends, a problem emerged of how the users should establish
and manage their presence on the Web, namely their digital identities. This issue
is being researched for many years now [5].
One of the major challenges concerning the identity management systems is
creation and maintenance of many perspectives on users identity, called virtual
identities, most preferably without explicit actions of the user. Virtual identity
is understood as a collection of topics concerning specific interest of a user. In
2 Agata Filipowska and Jacek Malyszko
this paper we present a method that enables automatic identification of such
topics using Wikipedia and information extraction techniques. The method is
developed for the Polish language. It utilizes Wikipedia concepts but can easily
be extended to DBpedia resources. As there is no Polish DBpedia yet, this will
not be covered by this article. However, the work on Polish DBpedia is ongoing
and this will be addressed in the future.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 is devoted to
a short summary of virtual identity definitions. In the next section, we indicate
current projects and existing approaches that raise the issue of users virtual
identities and provide solutions in this area. Section 4 describes the method
proposed to identify concepts building the users identity. Finally, in Section 5
we focus on a Use Case demonstrating the application of the method. The article
concludes with the final remarks.
2 Definition of Identity
The concept of an identity has been adopted by Information Science as a formal
representation of knowledge about a certain person, or any other (digital or
real-world) subject. Concerning an identity of a person, it is understood as a
set of attributes (permanent or temporary) characterizing a person [13], that is
required by providers of services that the person uses [8]. Obviously, a virtual
identity cannot capture all characteristics of a person; it is therefore only a partial
representation of a subject [13], [14]. Traditionally, an identity is considered as a
permanent entity, persisted in a kind of a datastore in order to be accessible many
times for a long period of time. However, it can be also understood as something
created on-the-fly and used (attached to a person) only during a single session,
while a user performs certain tasks or when a particular transaction is performed
[7], [13].
More generally, a virtual identity can be defined as a digital representation
of a set of claims made by one party about itself or another digital subject [3]. A
natural person (a human being) is one example of such entity; other example is
a whole organization (i.e. juridical person) [14]. An identity can either be used
in a single environment (for example, in a single system or company), or used in
many different environments, for example across organizational boundaries. At
the same time, different information about every entity is exchanged in differ-
ent contexts; for example, different user characteristics are needed in e-banking
portals and in movie recommender systems. We can therefore either say, that
a virtual identity is just one set of claims about a digital subject and for any
given digital subject there will typically exist many virtual identities [7], or that
each subject has only one identity, but such identity has multiple facets, that
are used depending on the context [13].
The identity of a digital subject can be established by combining both the
real-world attributes (for example name, address, social security number, physi-
cal traits, etc.) and the digital ones (such as passwords, access rights, biometrics,
type of encoding, network address and so on) [6]. The information stored in an
Towards using Wikipedia for building user identities 3
identity can be used either for the authentication purposes (its goal is to ensure,
that a certain person is indeed what he or she claims to be), or as the attribute
information (representing the details about the person) [14]. A set of processes
relating to the disclosure of the information about the person and usage of this
information is called identification [13].
For the requirements of the ”Ego - Virtual identity” (Ego) project1 , presented
in the paper, the identity is understood as an information structure describing
the information needs of a user. This structure is grounded in the Wikipedia
concepts’ graph to ease its maintenance and assure usefulness while personaliz-
ing information content, especially from the information needs evolution point
of view. The future work concerns extending the method towards DBpedia re-
sources.
3 Related work
In the following sections, we present the state of the art analysis of the identity
management systems on the Internet in terms of the business goals, that they
pursue and the functionalities, that they provide. We identify the most important
projects and solutions in the area of identity management systems, that may
benefit from the approach we suggest. The main projects that we concentrated
on are following: FIDIS2 , SWIFT3 , PICOS4 , PRIME5 , STORK6 , ProjectVRM7 .
Moreover, there exist also frequently updated lists of identity-related efforts8 .
In addition to the above-mentioned projects, a number of already imple-
mented solutions were analyzed. These solutions however mainly focus on the
authorisation aspect, leaving behind the notion of user representation e.g. the
OpenID protocol describes a user with a limited set of attributes only [11]. Sim-
ilar, authorisation focused, approaches are e.g. [12], [2], [4]. An interesting, and
comparable to ours effort is WebID [15] that uses FOAF vocabulary to describe
a user.
Some of the solutions are widely used in business, for example the OAuth
protocol 9 or various OpenID implementations, while some of them are at earlier
stages of development and adoption, e.g. WebID and Higgins.
Finally, its also very important to indicate, that several organizations have
emerged and aim at consolidating and coordinating efforts in the area, of which
1
http://kie.ue.poznan.pl/en/project/ego-virtual-identity
2
http://www.fidis.net/
3
http://www.ist-swift.org/
4
http://www.picos-project.eu/
5
https://www.prime-project.eu/
6
https://www.eid-stork.eu/
7
http://projectvrm.org/
8
For example: http://personaldataecosystem.org/2011/06/startup/,
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/vrm/development/, accessed on 15/10/2013
9
It is used for example by Facebook, Google and Last.FM
4 Agata Filipowska and Jacek Malyszko
the most important are probably Kantara Initiative10 , Identity Commons11 and
formerly Liberty Alliance12 .
It can be easily noticed, that the concept of virtual identities is heavily stud-
ied. Nevertheless, as it is a wide field to investigate, different areas of virtual
identity creation, maintenance and usage can be explored by different projects.
To the best of our knowledge, the approach focusing on automatic creation of
users virtual identity that links experience from the fields of information extrac-
tion and Wikipedia does not exist.
4 Approach and methods used
This section presents details of the approach we apply to create the identity of
a user. The phases of creating the users virtual identity are as follows:
Phase 1: Tracing user behavior. The first step towards building a user’s
identity concerns identification of topics of user’s interest. Of course, these topics
can be entered manually by a user (a so-called explicit user modeling [17]), but
the identity management systems usually provide additional functionalities to
make the whole process more effective.
There is a lot of information about a user even before she or he starts using
a given identity management system. Such information is often spread across
multiple domains such as web portals, social networking sites, etc. Therefore,
the identity management systems can try to somehow import and aggregate in-
formation about the user from such sources automatically. To make that feasible,
the user’s data export mechanisms must be made available by owners of such
systems. An example of such initiatives are Data Liberation Front13 and Data
Portability Project14 .
We build the identity of a user based on a wide range of his activities on the
Web. Our goal is to engage the service providers in this process, as discussed
in [16]. At the current stage of the experiment, we focus on building user’s
identity based on analysis of the Web pages the user visited. To that end, we
have implemented a Web browser plug-in, which a user has to install and have it
enabled while browsing. The plug-in extracts (structural, XSLT extraction) the
main content of the website and commits it on the server.
Phase 2: Analysis of the visited Web sites. The content that is uploaded
to the server is analyzed using the lexical extraction module to identify the
differentiating phrases and assign a topic. For the list of topics that are the most
representative for the whole content of the network, we chose the Wikipedia
categories and concepts list.
The extracted content of the website is analyzed using NLP to identify named
entities, cross references, etc. and as a result provide a set of words (surfaces
10
http://kantarainitiative.org/
11
http://www.identitycommons.net/
12
http://projectliberty.org/
13
http://www.dataliberation.org
14
http://dataportability.org/
Towards using Wikipedia for building user identities 5
existing in the text, further being referred to as phrases), that will be subject to
further processing. What is important, that the approach works for the Polish
language and is contextual.
Phase 3: Building a representation of a website for the needs of the
identity building. The most crucial step, from the point of view of this paper,
as well as for the user acceptance of the system being developed, is indication of
a topic, the website mentions. This is done in the following steps.
Firstly (in the preparatory phase), all Wikipedia pages are processed in or-
der to identify concepts (Wikilinks) that appear on these pages in order to learn
a phrases-concepts mapping, similarly as it was done by [10]. This process is
repeated periodically. Thus, we have obtained 5.150.143 phrase – concept map-
pings. This mapping is ambiguous, as many phrases may point to many different
Wikipedia concepts (on average, each phrase points to 1.21 concepts, but there
are some phrases that are mapped to up to 4000 concepts). Still, based on that
for each phrase we are able to retrieve a list of candidate concepts.
The method of indication of a topic of a website assigns to each phrase from
the text (f ) concepts from Wikipedia (c1 – c6 in Figure 1) obtained as indi-
cated in the previous paragraph. Then, for these concepts (c1 – c6), the upper
level categories of concepts are indicated (c11 – c51). The Wikipedia category
structure enables to build a whole tree over the initial concepts that were as-
signed, e.g. for concept Peter Higgs, based on the Polish Wikipedia structure,
we retrieve categories such as Scottish Physicists, Born in 1929, etc. Currently,
we use only three levels within the tree (experimentally evaluated). Then, us-
ing the bottom-up propagation method the first-level concepts (mapped from
phrases extracted from the website content) vote for the upper level concepts.
The bottom up propagation measure combines five frequencies:
– The number of times a phrase from the article text refers to a concept from
the Wikipedia.
– The number of times a phrase (surface form) appears in the Wikipedia.
– The number of times a given concept is referenced within the Wikipedia.
– The frequency of a word in the language (in our case the Polish language).
– The number of sub-concepts of a concept.
As a result of the bottom-up propagation, we identify a concept (not necessar-
ily the top-level one), that is the most probable topic of the website. Afterwards,
the phrase from the website being the most strongly connected with the concept
assigned as a topic, is removed from the initial list of phrases and the procedure is
repeated for the remaining phrases. While experimenting, we identified that for
most of the articles three iterations are enough to provide the most meaningful
concepts describing the website’s topic.
These concepts are then mapped on the user’s virtual identity. Each new
package of topics, changes the initial identity. The weights assigned to different
topics within the identity, reflect also maturing in time. Also, user may support
this process by manually extending the list of automatically assigned categories.
The user identity created by the system, may be then further used for the
needs of personalization of websites visited by the user. The Ego system is to pro-
6 Agata Filipowska and Jacek Malyszko
Fig. 1. The multi-layer representation of the article: phrases extracted (f) and
Wikipedia concept hierarchy (c).
vide a number of functionalities enabling for sharing and encrypting the identity,
authorizing a service provider as well as enabling user to manage the identity
and to access it [16].
5 Use Case-based Validation
The presented approach is about to be validated with the real users, who com-
mitted to use Ego for a certain period of time and share their experiences. Up
till now, the Use Case-based validation has been performed. For the sake of clar-
ity, we present details based on one news article only. The article concerns the
Noble Prize Winner Peter Higgs (it is in Polish and is available at Polskie Radio
website15 .
The content of the article was extracted and loaded in the database as a logi-
cal document (this concerns the topic and the content of the article; menus, com-
ments etc. are not further analysed). Then, the lexical extraction rules extracted
44 different phrases from the article e.g. uroczystości (celebration), professor,
etc., out of which 31 were mapped on Wikipedia phrases.
For these Wikipedia phrases, 2052 Wikipedia concepts were retrieved (iden-
tified by different URLs) including three upper levels (2052 is a total number
of concepts in the tree initially representing the topic of the article). The most
frequent concepts in the first level mapping were e.g. fizyka (physics), konfer-
encje miedzynarodowe (international conferences), mechanika kwantowa (quan-
tum physics), II wojna światowa (second world war).
15
http://www.polskieradio.pl/23/266/Artykul/951564,
Profesor-Higgs-zapadl-sie-pod-ziemie-
Towards using Wikipedia for building user identities 7
Then, the relations between different concept categories were exploited using
the bottom up propagation method. After applying the method, the following
concepts were identified as the most descriptive for the article (in the order of
importance):
– Urodzeni w XX wieku (born in XX century),
– Popularność (Popularity),
– Higgs,
– Szkolnictwo wyższe (Higher education),
– Nauki przyrodnicze (Natural sciences).
These concepts may be then further mapped on the Wikipedia category
structure graph representing the users identity, but this issue is beyond the
scope of this paper.
6 Conclusions and future work
The goal of this paper was to present a method that enables for identification
of topics that are of user’s interest using Wikipedia and information extraction
techniques, and based on the behavior of a user on the Web. Starting from
a general summary of the Virtual Identity definitions, we presented a method
that may be used in order to create user identities using Wikipedia. We also
demonstrated an application scenario.
The future work will especially be devoted to tuning of mechanisms developed
as well as carrying out an extensive validation of the approach with the real users.
The major issue that needs additional research is the bottom-up propagation
method that should eliminate concepts being pointed from the multiple websites
such as e.g. born in XX century.
Further research will also concern changing the Wikipedia to the DBpedia to
allow for an extensive reasoning. This could also offer additional functionalities
to an identity management system and service providers that will benefit from
it. However, the work on the Polish DBpedia is still the ongoing effort.
Acknowledgments. The work published in this article was supported by the
Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education (decision no. 0987/R/H03/2010/10),
upon contract with the Polish National Centre of Research and Development
(NCBiR) (contract no. NR11-0037-10/2011) on the project titled: “Ego – Vir-
tual Identity” (http://kie.ue.poznan.pl/en/project/ego-virtual-identity).
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