AHA! progress report October 2, 2001

transparent adaptive functionality for web servers

Personnel

The NLnet AHA project has started on July 1, 2001, when one of the two appointed junior researchers, Natash Stash, commenced work at the TU/e.
There is still a problem with the second junior researcher, Olga Proskura, who will commence work when passport and visa issues will be settled.

In the mean time two students from TU/e have started working on the project and as of October 5, two students from the University of Antwerp (UIA) will also start working on the project. The TU/e students will be working on AHA for 3 months, the UIA students for 9 months.

Activities and results

The current division of tasks among the AHA project team members is the following:

• Natasha Stash is working on the issue of enabling the AHA system to retrieve documents from external sources. The actual retrieval of external documents has been implemented. Natasha is now working on the issue of filtering documents so that external HTML or HTML+AHA documents can be translated to AHA documents upon retrieval, and then parsed by the AHA engine.
• Jurgen van Westreenen is designing a user-interface (editor) for entering and modifyingrequirementsthat guide the adaptation. Such requirements represent dependencies or rules for reading order between pages or between pages and concepts. Jurgen's internship also includes implementation of this interface.
• David Smits is designing the coupling of the AHA engine with the mySQL database. At the same time he is including features for representing multiple attributes per concept. David's internship also includes implementation of the database coupling.
• The two students in Antwerp: Koen Verheyen and Davy Floes will commence work shortly. It is still open which of the parts of the AHA projects they are going to tackle.
• Meanwhile some small projects are still going on or nearing completion. These include making AHA work with the Apache/Tomcat server and the integration of the DTD for pages with the one for headers and footers.

A Web address has been allocated for the AHA project. The first PR activity of the AHA project will be the creation of this website and the inclusion of the most recent "production" version of AHA and its tutorial. The address is http://aha.win.tue.nl/.