Toward an adaptive WWW: a case study in customized hypermedia
Kathryn F. Gates, Pamela B. Lawhead, Dawn E. Wilkins · New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia · 1998
The widespread and rapid growth of the World Wide Web (WWW) is a clear indicator of its success as an instrument for information delivery. At the same time, significant limitations in many current Web-based applications demonstrate the need for new research. The history of hypermedia usability research predating the WWW and the relatively new area of research in Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) offer promising possibilities for enhancing this new medium. The problem is to design an AHS which (1) provides the integration of information from heterogeneous sources into a unified interface, (2) provides a filtering mechanism so that users see and interact with a view that is customized to their needs, (3) delivers this information through a Web interface, and (4) supports the automatic creation and validation of links between related items to help with ongoing maintenance of the application. We present a design to address this problem which makes use of object-oriented methods, information retrieval techniques (specifically, the Vector Space Model), and user modeling. A Web-based reference guide known as “SmartGuide“ has been implemented using the design, and usability tests and expert reviews have been conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the design.