We revisit the top-level ontology Gumo for the uniform management of user and context models in a semantic web environment. We discuss design decisions, while putting the focus on ontological issues. The structural integration into user model servers, especially into the U2M-UserModel&ContextService, is also presented. We show ubiquitous applications using the user model ontology Gumo together with the user model markup language UserML. Finally, we ask how data from Web 2.0 and especially from a social tagging application like del.icio.us as a basis for user adaptation and context-awareness could influence the ontology

A commonly accepted top level ontology for user and context models is of great importance for the user modeling and context research community. This ontology should be represented in a modern semantic web language like OWL and thus be available for all user-adaptive systems at the same time via internet. The major advantage would be the simplification for exchanging user model and context data between different user-adaptive systems.

However, the current trends of web 2.0 and social computing tell us that the users like to create their own tag spaces, naming conventions and taxonomies. The masses of tagging, rating and even blogging define a kind of ”wisdom of the crowds”. Now the question arises how this new bottom-up approach can be combined with the more top-down approach of ontology engineering. Does a revisiting of a domain ontology like the user model and context ontology GUMO make sense? There are two directions of mutual influence possible. An existing ontology could be used in taxonomy learning of tag spaces in a way of seeding, or the other way round, the taxonomies that are dynamically generated by the tagging behavior of communities can be used to correct or update existing ontologies. Approaches for tag-space mining are presented in [Schmitz et al., 2006]

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