Adaptation Engineering in Adaptive Concept-Based System

Abstract

This chapter presents main issues and the state of the art of research on adaptation engineering in adaptive concept-based systems. Adaptive concept-based systems are characterised by the prominent role of concept structures, which makes content classification and conceptualisation play central roles in engineering. On top of these concept structures, adaptation is engineered in order to achieve personalisation of both the content and their presentation. For this presentation many systems use hypermedia structures, as that nicely supports the Web-based application. As a consequence, navigation adaptation is also a central issue in system design. Next to modelling domain and adaptation, it is necessary to model the user and what the system knows or assumes of the user. To discuss different approaches to these issues, we have identified three main classes of adaptive concept-based systems. Adaptive Web information systems build the more general class of data-intensive applications. We use the Hera design methodology to explain the properties of this class. The second class of systems is that of adaptive hypermedia systems. On the basis of the AHAM reference model and the AHA! system, we illustrate this class. The third class consists of adaptive task-based systems, for which we present AIMS as a representative.