Context-Aware Adaptation: A Case Study On Mathematical Notations

Abstract

In the last two decades, the World Wide Web has become the universal, and -for many users -main information source. Search engines can efficiently serve daily life information needs due to the enormous redundancy of relevant resources on the web. For educational -and even more so for scientific information needs, the web functions much less efficiently: Scientific publishing is built on a culture of unique reference publications, and moreover abounds with specialized structures, such as technical nomenclature, notational conventions, references, tables, or graphs. Moreover, many of these structures are peculiar to specialized communities determined by nationality, research group membership, or adherence to a special school of thought. To keep the much-lamented "digital divide" from becoming a "cultural divide", we have to make online material more accessible and adaptable to individual users.In this paper we attack this goal for the field of mathematics where knowledge is abstract, highly structured, and extraordinarily interlinked. Modern, content-based representation formats like OpenMath or content MathML allow us to capture, model, relate, and represent mathematical knowledge objects and thus make them context-aware and machine-adaptable to the respective user contexts. Building on previous work which can make mathematical notations adaptable we employ user modeling techniques to make them adaptive to relieve the reader of configuration tasks. We present a comprehensive framework for adaptive notation management and evaluate it on an implementation integrated in the e-learning platform panta rhei.