Customising Web Information Systems According to User Preferences

Abstract

Web Information Systems have to serve a variety of users with very diverse preferences regarding content, functionality and presentation. We first investigate the customisation of functionality at a high-level of abstraction, where possible action sequences are represented by an algebraic expression called plot, and user preferences give rise to equations. We show that the problem can be solved by applying conditional term rewriting on the basis of Kleene algebras with tests. By exploiting the idea of weakest preconditions such expressions can be represented by formal power series with coefficients in a Boolean algebra. This gives rise to a sufficient condition for termination based on well-founded orders on such power series. As confluence cannot be guaranteed, we propose critical pair completion to be used in order to enforce the desirable Church-Rosser property. In a second step we parametrise the actions and replace the Boolean conditions by first-order formulae. We show that still term rewriting can be applied, but termination and Church Rosser property become problems that will require manual interaction, in particular, as preference rules will make use of the parameters. On the other hand the presence of first-order conditions can be used to extend the customisation to the content.

Enhancing accessibility to web mapping systems with technology-aligned adaptive profiles

“…Many currently available web mapping applications are not able to operate in anything but a desktop browser in a 'standard' environment, or will work with reduced capability or information access on tablets, smartphones, or netbooks with small screen sizes. Although there have been efforts to introduce adaptivity in general information systems to address usability (Klaus-Dieter, Bernhard, and Qing 2009;Peng and Silver 2007), device capability (Hintz and Fiala 2004) and screen size related issues (Adipat, Zhang, and Zhou 2011;Gang and Daimeng 2011), there are few specific applications of adaptivity to spatial systems, despite these systems being highly complex in terms of information dimensionality and functionality.…”

“…Functionality can also be adapted, as not all users are likely to make use of all available functionality (Angelaccio, Krek, and D'Ambrogio 2009;Benyon and Murray 1993;Klaus-Dieter, Bernhard, and Qing 2009;Peng and Silver 2007). By removing tools and functionality that a user is not likely to make use of, the simplicity of an interface can be greatly increased, preventing users from feeling that they are using 'elitist' software intended for more highly skilled people (Meng and Malczewski 2009).…”

Towards functional safety and security for adaptive and flexible business processes

“…Research on actor modelling, especially for software systems that are automatically adapted to their users, has become important, eg, for search engine optimisation, human decision making, or for Web Information System (mainly concentrating on the user interface), but hardly any in the context of business processes that have to be adapted due to actor attributes, preferences, and qualifications. In this section, we summarise our approach for generating actor‐specific variants (based on actor attributes) by extending the AdaVM concept and present initial results on a refinement of the H‐BPM method to support actor‐based adaptations to business process instances with regard to actor preferences and qualifications on a formal basis.…”

A theory of data-intensive software services

“…Together with the conditional equations that define the axioms for Kleene algebras with tests, we can use the given plot p and a postcondition β that we want to reach (it could simply be 1), and apply the equations as term rewriting rules to turn pβ into a simpler form, say P . This approach to rewriting on the basis of Kleene algebras with tests has been handled in detail in [30], and generalised to parameterised plots in [31]. Then, p would define a personalised plot, and the operations in it are the natural choice for the selection.…”