Publication
A Presentation Architecture for Individualized Content
Alberto González Palomo; Paul Libbrecht; Carsten Ullrich
In: Paul de Bra (Hrsg.). Workshop on Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web-Based Systems. Augmented Human International Conference (AH-2003), May 20, Pages 87-98, 2003.
Abstract
A modern approach for generating individualized web-sites is to compose a page out of
individual elements, for instance XML-fragments, which is eventually transformed to . If the
generated pages differ for each user, then the required transformation processes put a heavy
load on the server, hence slowing down response times significantly.
The learning environment ACTIVEMATH uses this composing approach to generate learning
courses that suit best the needs and goals of the individual learner. For instance, depending on
their current knowledge, different users that learn the same content get presented courses that
differ in length and in amount and difficulty of exercises and examples. Currently, the
learning materials are transformed in one step from XML to (or other output formats).
The learning materials are encoded in a language called OMDoc which encodes semantically
the fragments as well as the mathematical formulae. This article hence provides an approach
to the answer "How can Semantic Web technology be used to improve adaptation and
information retrieval?". Moreover the ability to generate multiple output formats from the
same content source is a central requirement of the architecture. It provides a first step
towards device adaptation providing, currently, an on-screen version and a printable PDF
version.
This article describes the architecture we developed to solve the performance problems that
arouse out of the page generation process. In this architecture, the generation process is
divided into several layers, with each layer adding/transforming well-specified data. Among
other advantages, this approach allows caching of individual transformed fragments. We hope
that in this way the performance problems can be reduced.