Artificial Intelligence, Data Mining, E-Learning methods, Semantic Web technologies, all have as a purpose the satisfaction of user’s needs. Nowadays, the user profile is considered as one of the most important constraint to take into account to perform  the accuracy of the results returned by applications and computer systems (personalization and recommendation systems). A user profile is a knowledge related to a specific user, it may be extracted from several sources having different format and, most of time, geographically distributed, this is why, this knowledge need to be collected, predicted, managed, filtered and represented in such away to be exploited. In this paper, we present a survey about the most important works, by dividing the profiling process into three major steps: modeling, constructing and management user profiles. We’ll present the different techniques and methods used in: web, ubiquitous and cloud environment and we’ll discuss some of the challenges and the future trends in the user profiling area.