Creating Adaptive Web-Based Applications

Creating Adaptive Web-Based Applications 1Paul De Bra, Natalia Stash, David Smits 1 Eindhoven University of Technology Department of Computer Science PO Box 513, NL 5600 MB Eindhoven The Netherlands {debra,nstach,dsmits}@win.tue.nl Abstract. The subjects of adaptation and user modeling go hand in hand. User modeling is often performed in order to adapt an application to the user, and the user’s interaction with an application is the basis for the user modeling. This tutorial describes the overall architecture of adaptive Web-based (hypermedia) applica-tions, based on the request/response paradigm used on the Web. Events (like page requests or forms that are filled out and submitted) trigger some form of “rules” that are used to update a user model. The requested in-formation (or other response of the system) is filtered based on the current user model state. The content and presentation of information pages can be adapted, and the links that are shown inside or alongside the pages can be adapted too. After studying the general framework we describe how to create adaptive Web-based ap-plications using the AHA! system (version 3.0). In this system the adaptation is defined using concepts and concept relationships. These can be created through a graphical (graph-based) editor, or through other tools that provide a translation to the xml-based AHA! authoring format(s). The content of an application is cre-ated using standard xhtml (and other media objects ...