AHA! progress report, May 29, 2003

transparent adaptive functionality for web servers

Progress up to this date

The status of the AHA! project is as follows:

• The AHA! 2.0 system is nearing completion. It is available in "almost final" version, from the AHA! site a well as from SourceForge. Recent additions include authorization for authors.
• AHA! 3.0 is available as an early prerelease. Bart Berden and Barend de Lange are still ironing out some bugs.
• The work of Tomi Santic on "the layout model" (or "page constructors" as we used to call it) is being integrated into the 3.0 version.
• Two test applications for AHA! 3.0 are being constructed, one for a simulation of an electronic shop, by Peter Barna, and one for a simulation of different author and user personas for a museum guide, by Susanne Loeber.
• More presentations have been given on AHA!: Tomi Santic has presented the Layout Model work at the AH2003 workshop in Budapest, May 2003. Natasha Stash has presented the recent AHA! developments at the NLUUG Conference, Ede, May 2003.
• More presentations about AHA! have been scheduled: A talk about an AHA! application by Cristobal Romero is scheduled for the User Modeling Conference in Johnstown, PA, June 2003. A paper on AHA! will be presented at the PEG Conference (Powerful ICT Tools for Teaching and Learning) (Sint Petersburg, Russia, June 2003. A paper presentation about the AHA! versus Auld Linky work of Koen Aben will be given at the ACM Hypertext'03 conference in Nottingham, August 2003. A technical briefing about AHA! is also planned for this conference. Two presentations, one about the object inclusion and stable presentations (Barend de Lange and Bart Berden) and one about the Layout Model (Tomi Santic) have been accepted for the Elearn Conference in Phoenix, AZ, November 2003.
• Discussions with researchers from the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Hannover, Trinity College Dublin, and ENST, Brest, have lead to the setup of a discussion list on protocols for the exchange of information (domain and user model data) between different adaptive Web-based systems. Ideas from these discussions have already been incorporated in a new project proposal.
• The Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia Homepage has been made adaptive (but isn't online yet). This has enabled us to identify some shortcomings of AHA! for interactive applications with data entry by users and with the use of dates.

Work on AHA! Version 2.0 and 3.0 will continue, and result in a "final" release of 2.0 and preliminary version(s) of 3.0. After June 30, the development of applications (courses) using AHA! 2.0 will start. AHA! 2.0 will be used as a "production" platform until AHA! 3.0 becomes stable enough.