Automated Web Page Synthesis in Adaptive Web Systems

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Automated Web Page Synthesis in Adaptive Web
Systems

• Hossein Sadat and Ali A. Ghorbani
• University of New Brunswick

2
Overview

• Introduction
• Related Work
• Page Synthesis Process
• The Proposed System Architecture
• Conclusion and Future Work

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Introduction

• Adaptive Web Systems
• Producing response based on
• User behavior and preferences
• Environment
• Technology
• Dynamic Page Generation
• Different degrees of dynamism
• Dynamic page generation is a requirement for
  adaptation

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Introduction

• Adaptive Hypermedia Systems (AHS) can be defined
  by
• User Model
• Domain Model
• Adaptation Model
• We would like to formalize dynamic page
  generation based on three models of AHSs
• Page Synthesis putting information fragments
  together to produce a page

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Related Work

• Index Page Synthesis
• Index page a page consisting of links to a set
  of pages that cover a particular topic
• The synthesis of an index page is divided into
  several sub-problems, such as determining the
  contents, their order, the title of the page,
  etc.
• Only the first sub-problem, that is determining
  the contents of the page, has been investigated

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Related Work

• SETA
• A prototype toolkit for building adaptive Web
  stores
• Dynamically selects the content of a page based
  on the users interests and familiarity with the
  products
• Sorts the items of a product class based on the
  users preferences

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• SeAN
• Adaptive system for personalized access to news
• Three goals
• Selecting news topics relevant to the user
• Presenting appropriate level of details for the
  news
• Providing advertisement most relevant to the user
  and current page

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Related Work

• Each piece of news is considered as a composite
  entity having several attributes defining its
  components
• Title, abstract, full text, author, pictures,
  video can be attributes
• Based on this representation, different levels of
  details can be used for a piece of news based on
  the user model
• The pages are generated according to the selected
  details

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Related Work

• Peba-II
• An online animal encyclopedia
• Produces descriptions and comparisons of animals
  as WWW pages
• The aim is to construct a natural language
  document generation system

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Related Work

• Automated Website Synthesis
• An approach for design and maintenance of Web
  site applications
• The website code is derived from its content via
  automated synthesis
• This work is different from what we refer to as
  page synthesis offline, not model-based

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Page Synthesis Process

• Consists of
• Request analysis and concept extraction
• Information fragments (components) extraction
• Adaptation rules/programs execution and final
  components selection
• Page template and presentation attributes
  selection
• Final page generation

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The Proposed System Architecture
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The Proposed System Architecture

• Web Server
• A conventional Web server, responsible to handle
  HTTP requests
• Filter
• A processing unit preprocessing the requests and
  post-processing the responses
• Front controller of the system
• Converts an HTTP request to a synthesis request

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The Proposed System Architecture

• Adaptation Server
• Responsible for producing a page for a request
• Creates, manages and release processes for
  clients requests
• Session Process
• Dispatcher
• Data Tier

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The Proposed System Architecture

• Session Process
• Synthesis Engine
• Model Update Engine
• Interpreter
• Run-time Workspace

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The Proposed System Architecture

• Synthesis Engine (SE)
• Responsible for assembling a page by fetching
  related fragments and executing adaptation
  rules/programs
• Models Update Engine (MUE)
• Responsible for updating all the system models,
  including user model and system profile, based on
  the current request
• Interpreter
• Executes the rules/programs that SE and MUE send
• Runtime Workspace
• A component that controls a shared space for the
  results of all the operations accomplished by
  Interpreter, SE, and MUE, while a processing a
  request

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The Proposed System Architecture

• Application Description
• Component Repository
• All the information fragments are stored in this
  repository
• The fragments are stored with a format that
  specifies the content of the fragment and its
  relationship to the domain concepts
• User Model Structure
• Application dependent? should be defined for each
  application
• Two parts demographic attributes and
  application-specific attributes
• Adaptation Description
• Describes when and how the application adapts

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• can be described by a program
• These programs then can be executed by the
  Interpreter
• Domain Model Description
• Describes the concept hierarchy and other
  relationships between conceptual entities in the
  application
• Templates
• May exist statically or created dynamically
• Specifies the layout and presentation attributes
  of the pages, independent of the content of the
  pages

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Conclusion

• Page Synthesis defined as a systematic procedure
  for dynamically generating Web pages in adaptive
  hypermedia systems
• Page synthesis consists of Several steps request
  analysis, component selection, adaptation program
  execution and components refinement, template
  selection, and final page rendering

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Conclusion

• Java Servlet technology is used for Web front
  end, though the proposed architecture imposes no
  restriction
• The proposed architecture is domain-independent
  and may be used for a variety of Web systems

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Future Work

• Future work includes
• Integration of the architecture with available
  platforms, such as J2EE and .NET
• Simplifying the authoring tasks
• Content authoring
• Investigating the best trade-off between the
  degree of programmability of the adaptation
  server and the complexity of authoring tasks
• Find out if rules powerful enough to describe an
  adaptation model for this architecture?
• Providing an evaluation framework for this
  architecture

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Thank You
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The Proposed System Architecture

• Dispatcher
• This component launches a process for each new
  client
• Data Tier
• This is a layer of data access objects that do
  the database-related operations
• Other components of the adaptation server use
  this layer for database access