As some (potential) clients of ours have come up with the need for User profiling in one way or the other, we had some thoughts about it.
The main idea is to have the possibility to ask the user additional questions depending on:
- The site he is coming from
- The group/community he is about to join
- The role he has within this group/community.
I think the latter two should be obvious. The first one needs a little bit of explanation. Assume you are an organization with multiple systems connected to the internet, able to understand HTTP. All of these systems tend to have their own way of storing user information. They even have their own user management most of the time. This is fine, but it does not allow you to gather user data across all your systems. The idea now is to have a central place to store all the user information.
At the moment we have two ways of handling the questioning. One would be through the use of registers, which are targeted to a special type of users (so, if a user wants to join community foo, he has to go through /answer-questions?register_id=xxx, where xxx relates to the community foo. This way we would map groups/communities/roles to certain registers.
The other way would be to turn it around and demand that all registers are assigned to a group. So if you want to handle the information for us.sussdorff-roy.com you'll have a special group just for these users on the register.sussdorff-roy.com site.
Now there are two ways to handle the questioning. One is to use your own question creation application, the other one is to entirely rely on the survey module. The first one is more straightforward (as we have done something similar for ACS 3.x), but the other one would offer you the possibility to use additional functionality of the survey module as it matures (I talk about branching, conditioned questions, sectioning).
As this functionality should be as open as possible and hopefully pushed back into OpenACS, I would like to ask you for comments on the options mentioned, what other ways you envision, how I can make things clearer aso. asf.. Especially interesting would be how easy it is to integrate survey functionality into other modules at the moment or how hard it would be to add this capabilities.
