Web Design Dimension and Adaptation

Abstract

Recent developments in the World Wide Web infrastructure enabled the development of highly interactive hypermedia systems for e-commerce, e-government, and mobile commerce. Such applications have much to gain exploring adaptation, through the use of adaptable and adaptive mechanisms to customize services and interfaces. Adaptable systems are those that can be configured by the user before or during their use. Adaptive systems automatically acquire input data in order to infer adaptation opportunities and react accordingly. Adaptable and adaptive systems consider three different adaptation targets: human matters, interaction matters, and computer matters. The first target regards preferences, interests, and other personal information to allow system personalization. The second target regards goals and activities that are intended by the user in order to adjust the system according to the dialogue with the human being. The third target regards resource-availability discovery and optimization, such as needed by mobile applications due to limitations in computation and communication infrastructure. The design of modern hypermedia systems requires an integrated approach contemplating modeling principles, evaluation frameworks, and reference models. Several approaches and methods exist, but it is difficult to understand how they complement or interfere among themselves during a design. Fischer (1989) considers that systems with strong interactive requirements, such as those related to usability, lack structure and present design instability. Adaptation aggravates this difficulty. Tobar and Ricarte (2005) believe that one of the main reasons behind the difficulty in developing and evaluating adaptable and adaptive systems is the absence of a reference (normative) model for describing them from different perspectives. They provided some clues toward this missing type of model through the E-ACM (extended abstract categorization map), used to present modeling dimensions. It is a graphical representation to capture different aspects of hypermedia systems and models, considering all types of adaptation. It can be used before system authoring and design to a broad spectrum of hypermedia applications including e-commerce, e-government, and mobile commerce.