E Evgeny Knutov

AH 12 years later: a comprehensive survey of adaptive hypermedia methods and techniques

A hypermedia application offers its users much freedom to navigate through a large hyperspace. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) offers personalized content, presentation, and navigation support. Many adaptive hypermedia systems (AHS) are tightly integrated with one specific application and/or use a limited number of techniques and methods. This makes it difficult to capture all of them in one generic model. In this paper we examine adaptation questions stated in the very beginning of the AH era and elaborate on their recent interpretations. We will reconsider design issues for application independent generic AHS, review open questions of system extensibility introduced in adjacent research fields and try to come up with an up-to-date taxonomy of adaptation techniques and an extensive set of requirements for a new adaptive system reference model or architecture, to be developed in the future.

GAF: Generic Adaptation Framework

The Generic Adaptation Framework research project aims to develop a new reference modelfor the adaptive information systems research field. The new model will extend the well known AHAM reference model, taking into account newly developed techniques and methodologies in this area as well as attempts to capture them in architecture models such as the Munich Reference Model [4], LAOS/LAG [2], [5] and the extension from pure adaptive hypermediato adaptive information systems, as studied in the Hera research program for instance [6].

GALE: a generic open source extensible adaptation engine

This paper motivates and describes GALE, the Generic Adaptation Language and Engine that came out of the GRAPPLE EU FP7 project. The main focus of the paper is the extensible nature of GALE. The purpose of this description is to illustrate how a single core adaptation engine can be used for different types of adaptation, applied to different types of information items and documents. We illustrate the adaptive functionality on some examples of hypermedia documents. In April 2012, David Smits defended the worlds first adaptive PhD thesis on this topic. The thesis, available for download and direct adaptive access at http://gale.win.tue.nl/thesis/, shows that a single source of information can serve different audiences and at the same time also allows more freedom of navigation than is possible in any paper or static hypermedia document. The same can be done for course texts, hyperfiction, encyclopedia, museum, or other cultural heritage websites, etc. We explain how to add functionality to GALE if desired, to adapt the systems behavior to whatever the application requires. This stresses our main objective: to provide a technological base for adaptive (hypermedia) system researchers on which they can build extensions for the specific research they have in mind.

Adaptation and search: from Dexter and AHAM to GAF

Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) have long been concentrating on adaptive guidance of links between domain concepts. Here we show parallels between navigation and linking in adaptive hypermedia on the one hand and information searching or querying on the other hand. We present a transition towards search in AHS by aligning the web search process with the layered structure of AHS and adaptation process.

Provenance meets adaptive hypermedia

In this paper we consider provenance modelling in Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS). We revisit adaptation and data provenance questions and bring up new and complementary aspects of adaptation and provenance, showing similar and supplementing characteristics. We also scrutinize the provenance importance and issues in Adaptive Hypermedia (AH). The aim of this paper is to extend the conventional AH classification questions with the notion of data lineage which essentially plays an important role in adaptation.

Authoring of adaptive serious games

Game-based approaches to learning are increasingly being recognized as having the potential to stimulate intrinsic motivation amongst learners. Whilst a range of examples of effective serious games exist, creating the high-fidelity content with which to populate a serious game is resource-intensive task. To reduce this resource requirement, research is increasingly exploring means to reuse and repurpose existing games and relevant sources of content. Education has proven a popular application area for Adaptive Hypermedia, as adaptation can offer enriched learning experiences to students. Whilst content to-date has mainly been in the form of rich text, various efforts have been made to integrate Serious Games into Adaptive Hypermedia via run-time adaptation engines. However, there is little in the way of effective integrated authoring and user modeling support for these efforts. This paper explores avenues for effectively integrating serious games into adaptive hypermedia. In particular, we consider authoring and user modeling aspects in addition to integration into run-time adaptation engines, thereby enabling authors to create Adaptive Hypermedia that includes an adaptive game, thus going beyond mere selection of a suitable game and towards an approach with the capability to adapt and respond to the needs of learners and educators.