Supporting user adaptation in adaptive hypermedia applications

Abstract

: A hypermedia application offers its users a lot of freedom to navigate through a large hyperspace. The rich link structure of the hypermedia application can not only cause users to get lost in the hyperspace, but can also lead to comprehension problems because different users may be interested in different pieces of information or a different level of detail or difficulty. Adaptive hypermedia systems (or AHS for short) aim at overcoming these problems by providing adaptive navigation support and adaptive content. The adaptation is based on a user model that represents relevant aspects about the user. At the Eindhoven University of Technology we developed an AHS, named AHA [DC98]. To describe its functionality and that of future adaptive systems we also developed a reference model for the architecture of adaptive hypermedia applications, named AHAM (for Adaptive Hypermedia Application Model) [DHW99]. In AHAM knowledge is represented through hierarchies of large composite abstract con...