CS2310 Exercise 5(cs2310 project proposal)	Shuyi Shao

1. Introduction
Users with different goals and knowledge may be interested in different 
pieces of information with different presentation on a hypermedia page and 
may use different navigation(limiting browsing space, suggesting most 
relevant links to follow, or providing adaptive comments to visible 
links).[Peter1] Different terminals have different power to provide different 
quality of hypermedia information. All these trigger the motivation to 
information personalization - adaptive media technologies. Today, adaptive 
media technologies have been already widely used in many areas, such as 
distance learning, electronic commerce. Adaptive media technologies enable 
organizations and systems to cost-effectively provide the most suitable 
quality hypermedia (audio, video, and 3D visual information) on-demand to 
their users employees, customers, partners and users. Information 
personalization efficiently increases the functionality of hypermedia. 
We are mostly interested in adopting adaptive media technologies in distance 
learning systems - here, the Growing Book. 
Growing Book is an electronic book co-developed by a group of teachers who 
are geographically dispersed throughout the world and collaborate in teaching 
and research. The Growing Book is constantly evolving and it can be organized 
in different ways to be used in a regular semester course, a short course, an 
introductory exposition, an advanced seminar, etc. These multi-level, 
multimedia adaptive usages are supported by MWAC model-enhanced document 
technology. We can design a model-enhanced document by introducing extra MAWC 
tags into the document. The Growing Book provides an AWP operation that can 
generate multi-level, multimedia presentation from the model-enhanced 
hypermedia documents. [Chang1] So far, we can conclude that the MAWC tags are 
the source of the multi-level, multimedia adaptability of Growing Books. But 
unfortunately, we still have to manually add MAWC tags to Growing Book 
documents. That's boring and also let some errors slipping into tag-enhanced 
hypermedia documents. Thus we plan to develop a convenient tool to add tags 
to generate model-enhanced Growing Book documents.

In the following part of this document, I'll first give my critique of various
approaches about adaptive hypermedia - this the theoretical technology bases 
of this project. Then I will state what I propose to do and how to do. 
After that I'll tell why this project is worth doing. Finally, some 
discussions are talked.


2. My critique of various approaches and technologies of adaptive hypermedia

Adaptive hypermedia systems are the hypertext and hypermedia systems that 
reflect some features of the user in the user model and apply this model to 
adapt various visible aspects of the system to the user. [Peter1] 
From this definition, I want to point out 2 crucial aspects about adaptive 
media: the user model, the adapting ability of hypermedia documents. In the 
prototype Growing Book, we simplified the user model. But we model-enhanced 
the hypermedia documents by adding MAWC tags and thus make the adapting 
ability as the underlying nature of Growing Book hypermedia documents.
Although we simplified the user model in current Growing Book prototype, I 
still want to give a brief explanation about user model because it's a 
preliminary base of the adapting. User model tells what aspects of the user 
working with the system can be taken into account when providing adaptation 
and to which features, that can be different for different users (and may be 
different for the same user at different time), the system can adapt. So far, 
five features are identified: users' goals, knowledge, background, hyperspace 
experience, and preferences. Users' knowledge is the most important user 
feature for adaptive media systems. User's knowledge is a variable for a 
particular user. An adaptive hypermedia system has to recognize the changes in 
the user's knowledge state and update the user model accordingly. The goals of 
the user is a feature related with the context of a user's work, for work in 
application systems, for searching in information retrieval systems or for 
problem solving and learning in educational systems. The User's background is 
the information related to user's previous experience outside the subject of 
the hypermedia system. The user's experience is how familiar the user with the 
structure of the hyperspace and how easy can the user navigate in it. The 
preferences of users have to be informed into the system directly or indirectly
about such preferences or the system infers user's preferences from users' 
histories.

There're 5 adapting techniques from a "what can be adapted" point of view: 
direct guidance, sorting, hiding, annotation, map adaptation. Direct guidance 
is the simplest technique, the system can outline visually the link to the 
"best" node. Adaptive ordering is to sort all the links of a particular page 
according to the user model and to some user-valuable criteria: the more close 
to the top, the more relevant the link is. Hiding restricts the navigation 
space by hiding links to "not relevant" pages. Adaptive annotation augments 
the links with some form of comments that can tell the user more about the 
current state of the nodes behind the annotated links. Map adaptation is to 
comprise various ways of adapting the form(structure) of global and local 
hypermedia maps presented to the user.

The adapting technologies from the content adaptation point of view are 
additional explanations, prerequisite explanations and comparative 
explanations, and explanation variants. Additional explanations means hiding 
from the user some parts of information about a particular concept which are 
not relevant to the user's level of knowledge about this concept. The 
prerequisite explanations and comparative explanations are to change the 
information presented about a concept depending on the user knowledge level 
of related concepts. The explanation variants mean storing variants for some 
parts of the page content and the user gets the variant corresponds to his or 
her user model.

Adaptive navigation support techniques are used to achieve several adaptation 
goals: to provide global guidance, to provide local guidance, to support local 
orientation, to support global orientation, and to help with managing 
personalized views in information spaces. Global guidance can be provided 
in hypermedia systems where users have some "global" information goal and 
browsing is the way to find the required information. Local guidance is to 
help the user to make one navigation step by suggesting(according to the 
preferences, knowledge, and background of the user) the most relevant links 
to follow from the current node. Local orientation support is to help the 
user in local orientation (i.e., to help them in understanding what is around 
and what is his/her relative position in the hyperspace). By providing 
additional information(i.e. annotation) about the nodes available from the 
current node  and limiting(hiding) the number of navigation opportunities 
to decrease the cognitive overload. Global orientation support is to help 
the user to understand the structure of the overall hyperspace and his or 
her absolute position in it. Managing personalized views is to organize an 
electronic workplace for the users who need a access to a reasonably small 
part of a hyperspace. Each view is just a list of links to all hypermedia 
documents which are relevant to a particular working goal.


3. What I propose to do and how

What I proposed is to develop a support tool to do the model-enhancing work 
for Growing Books. The difficulty of this project is to retrieve the logical 
levels and media type information of the Growing Book documents. Naturally, 
we find there are mainly two ways to grab the information. 

The first way, we can use some editor to directly insert tags into documents 
or do some marking on the documents according to the logical structures and 
then develop a tool to translate the marking into MAWC tags. Another way is 
to automatically adding MAWC tags into HTML documents. This is more convenient 
for the users, but also more difficult to do because it need to analysis the 
logical structure and media type information of the HTML documents. My idea 
is to do it in the following ways. First, we find some patterns of the logical 
structure of the HTML documents. Second we will translate these patterns to 
logical structure rules. We get the media type information from the grammar 
of the document specification language, such as HTML, XML. This kind of 
information is also being translated into some rules. Then, we can analysis 
the logical structure and the media type information of the hypermedia 
document. With the information, to add MAWC tags to the Growing Book documents 
becomes straightforward. But we have to recognize that there are some risks on 
the second approach-If the rules only cover the documents written in some 
specific kind of style(i.e. using <h1>,<h2> tags to indicate the logical level 
structure), the tool will fail when it is used to enhance documents written in 
another type of style(i.e. using "1","1.1","1.1.1" to indicate the level). 
But we can solve this problem by elaborately designing rules to achieve good 
performance of this tool. I prefer the second approach because it is more 
powerful than the first approach although there're some risks.


4. Why this project is worth doing
This project is in the area of adaptive media, specifically for the Growing 
Book project. It's will be a convenient supporting tool to transform normal 
hypermedia documents (HTML files) into MAWC tag-enhanced hypermedia documents 
which can be adaptively used.


5. Discussions. 
In this document, I try give a brief taste of the idea of adaptive media and 
the project design for cs2310. This tool is a specific application instance 
for an adaptive hypermedia system - the Growing Book. There are a lot of thing 
of adaptive media left outside of this course project. But there are some 
theoretical problems can be considered starting in the future. For example, 
currently what level and what kind of media types will be included into the 
presentation by the Growing Book is determined by the user. Although the 
Growing Book itself has the adaptive ability, it only responses according to 
the users' demand passively. We can consider adaptive ability to the 
Growing Book by abstracting the Growing Book to active generalized objects 
that has the ability to tell the level and the requirement of the user and the 
power of user terminals and can automatically adapt the Growing Book documents 
according that information.



References

[Chang1] Shi-Kuo Chang, etc., "MAWC OPERATIONS FOR THE GROWING BOOK", 
http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~chang/bookds/gbieee.doc

[GB] http://www.cs.pitt.edu/~jung/GrowingBook
 
[Peter1] Peter Brusilovsky, CMU, "Methods and techniques of adaptive 
hypermedia", User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction, 1996, v 6, 
n 2-3, pp 87-129 

[Paul1] Paul De Bra, John Eklund, etc., "Adaptive Hypermedia: Purpose, 
Methods, and Techniques", 1999, 199 - 200  Series-Proceeding-Article , 
Darmstadt, Germany

[Marcus1] Marcus Specht and Reinhard Oppermann, GMD - German National 
Research Center for Information Technology Institute for Applied Information 
Technology, "ATS - Adaptive Teaching System a WWW-based ITS", . International 
Conference on Software Engineering:Proceedings of the international workshop 
on Principles of software evolution,2002 , Orlando, Florida , ACM Press , 
34 - 38  Series-Proceeding-Section-Article,2002 

[Weber1] Weber, G. & Specht, M. (1997). "User modeling and Adaptive Navigation 
Support in WWW-Based Tutoring Systems". In A. Jameson, C. Paris, & C. Tasso 
(Eds.), Proceedings of User Modeling (pp. 289-300). Chia Laguna: Springer.

[Agosti1] Agosti, M., M. Melucci, and F. Crestani: 1995, "Automatic authoring 
and construction of hypermedia for information retrieval". Multimedia Systems 
3 (1), 15-24.