AHA!

transparent adaptive functionality for web servers

The purpose of the AHA! project is to define, study and implement a facility for extending Web-servers with transparent, adaptive functionality. A Web-server is extended with a (servlet) module that registers users automatically, maintains a detailed user profile, and adapts the delivered information and the link structure based on that user profile. This server-side extension isgeneric, i.e. application independent, andopen, meaning that the source of the information may itself be external to the server running the adaptive engine.

More concretely, the AHA! project consists of two phases of one year each, with two people working in parallel. The funding of the second year shall depend on the outcome of the first year. The goals (research and development) of the two phases are:

Phase 1:

Design and development of a generic, open, adaptive engine, building on the initial AHA! prototype. The extensions include the ability to perform adaptation on documents from an external source, the ability to handle (and link to) composite objects, and better authoring support.

Phase 2:

Extending the design and implementation to allow richer user-models (with arbitrary attributes and value-domains), while maintaining desirable properties such as termination and confluence. A second extension will be the ability to define page constructors, i.e. ways to dynamically construct pages out of sets of information fragments. The authoring environment will also be extended to include support for these richer user models and page constructors.

The research results will be published in national and international conferences and journals. The software will be published on the Internet and distributed as Open Source, using the GNU licensing scheme. After completion of the first phase, we shall start actively promoting the use of AHA! for applications in education, electronic commerce and corporate websites.