A-OOH Adaptative Object Oriented HypermediaExtending web application design with dynamic personalization

Abstract

Web idiosyncrasy introduces new challenges for the design process that go further than the specification of the navigation map, including aspects such as continuous website evolution together with the existence of a heterogeneous audience that implies that the website design should cope with different users’ needs, goals, preferences, and capabilities. Adapting the information content and services for different user groups as well as for concrete users makes websites available to a broad audience and so, it has become a vital feature of modern Web applications. This adaptivity to individual users or user groups in a website is called personalization. We define Web personalization as the process of changing the content and structure of a website to adapt it to the specific needs, goals, interests and preferences of each user taking advantage of the user’s navigational behaviour. When designing Personalized Websites (PWS), ad-hoc design becomes unworkable. Website modeling methods provide a conceptual and systematic approach to complex Web application design and implementation. The first aim of this dissertation was to add personalization to the Object Oriented Hypermedia (OO-H) approach. For this purpose, OO-H is extended becoming A-OOH (adaptive OO-H). For being able to specify personalization strategies, a high level, ECA rule based language was defined called PRML (Personalization Rules Modeling Language). This language allows to specify the personalization atdesign time as an orthogonal concern of the website, independent of the underlying technology. The double purpose of PRML is making possible the reuse of personalization strategies among different approaches and allowing the definition of complex (and specific) personalization actions. For this purpose,two conformance levels are defined in this language: PRML Lite and PRML Full. PRML Full provides the designer a way of specifying more complex personalization actions than PRML Lite limiting the reusability. We argue that PRML Lite can be exported to the specifics of different Web methodologies. This implies that the PRML language is reusable as well as the personalization strategies defined with it. In this work it is explained how PRML Lite can be exported to the specifics of the UWE and Hera approaches defining a set of transformations to conceptually show it. A prototype tool that III automatically implements the defined transformations (the PRML translator) is also presented. Another important contribution is AWAC, a prototype CAWE tool for the automatic generation of adaptive Web applications using PRML. This tool implements the A-OOH (Adaptive Object Oriented Hypermedia) methodology.