UCIAD

User-Centric Integration of Activiry Data

UCIAD (User Centric Integration of Activity Data) is a JISC-funded project addressing the integration of activity data spread across various systems in an organization, and exploring how this integration can both benefit users and improve transparency in an organization.

Both research and commercial developments in the area of user activity data analysis have until now mostly focused on logging user visits to specific websites and systems, primarily in order to support recommendation, or to gather feedback data from users. However, data concerning a single user are generally fragmented across many different systems and logs, from website access logs to search data in different departments and as a result organizations typically are not able to maintain an integrated overview of the various activities of a given user, thus affecting their ability to provide optimal service to their users. Hence, a key tenet of the UCIAD project is that developing a coherent picture of the interactions between the user and the organization would be beneficial both to an organization and to its users.

The project, led and managed by Mathieu d'Aquin, will contribute to the current strand of research in KMi, which focuses on the use of semantic technologies to support online personal information management. The solutions developed in the project will be tested on a number of Open University systems, in collaboration with the Open University's communication services.

Thomas, K. (2014) Privacy Implications of Online Consumer-Activity Data: An Empirical Study, Workshop: Privacy Online 2014 - Second Workshop on Society, Privacy and the Semantic Web - Policy and Technology, Trentino, Italy