User model interoperability offers opportunities for acquiring relevant fragmented information about learners in order to provide cross-system personalisation and support for planning lifelong learning and related activities throughout life. To this end, in this paper, we adopt a service-based approach and develop a comprehensive ontology for planning lifelong learning that could serve as a reference model in order to support the development, mapping and integration of user models in the context of a lifelong learning network.

This paper appears in the Proceedings of the 6th International Workshop on Ubiquitous User Modeling with focus on User Model Intergration (UMI 2008) in conjuction with the 5th International Conference on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-based Systems, July 29, 2008, Hannover, Germany, pp. 28-32.