IntrospectiveViews: An Interface for Scrutinizing Semantic User Models

User models are a key component for user-adaptive systems. They represent information about users such as interests, expertise, goals, traits, etc. This information is used to achieve various adaptation effects, e.g., recommending relevant documents or products. To ensure acceptance by users, these models need to be scrutable, i.e., users must be able to view and alter them to understand and if necessary correct the assumptions the system makes about the user. However, in most existing systems, this goal is not met. In this paper, we introduce IntrospectiveViews, an interface that enables the user to view and edit her user model. Furthermore, we present the results of a formative evaluation that show the importance users give in general to different aspects of scrutable user models and also substantiate our claim that IntrospectiveViews is an appropriate realization of an interface to such models.