This presentation will describe the uses of light-weight ontologies in scrutable user modelling. It explores the role that light-weight ontologies can play, and ways they can be exploited, for the purpose of creating and maintaining a scrutable user model. Problems in four key areas are addressed: ontology creation, metadata annotation, user model creation, and user model visualisation, with a goal to provide a simple and adaptable approach that maintains scrutability.

Our solution is the development of a toolkit, LOSUM, which consists of a number of tools to support the user modelling process. It incorporates light-weight ontologies to fulfill a number of roles: aiding in metadata creation, providing structure for user model visualisation, and as a means to reason across granularities in the user model. In conjunction with this, LOSUM also features a novel visualisation tool, SIV, which performs a dual role of ontology and user model visualisation, supporting the process of ontology creation, metadata annotation, and user model visualisation.