Information Design TrendsUnit Five: Delivery ChannelsLecture 2: Portals and Personalization

Part 2

Web Personalization“Any action that adapts the information or services provided by a Web site to the needs of a particular user taking advantage of the knowledge gained from the users’ navigational behavior and individual interests, in combination with the content and structure of the Web site.” The objective of a Web personalization system is to “provide users with the information they want or need without expecting for them to ask for it explicitly.NOT the same as LAYOUT CUSTOMIZATION!

Principal Elements of a Web Personalization System

The categorization and preprocessing of Web data.The extraction of correlations between and across different kinds of such data.The determination of the actions that should be recommended by such a personalization system.

Approaches to Personalization

Content-based system-- system tracks each user’s behavior and recommends items that are similar to items the user liked in the past. Collaborative filtering system -- users rate objects and the system returns information predicted to be of interest to them. Rule-based filtering -- user is asked to answer a set of questions and receives a result tailored to his needs.Web usage mining -- process relies on the application of statistical and data mining methods to the Web log data, resulting in a set of patterns that indicate users’ behavior.

The Web Personalization Process

User profiles based on log mining will generally be somewhat out of date.Information acquisition and searching is still a largely human dependant task.

UserProfiling

LogAnalysis

ContentMgmt.

Web SitePublishing

Acquisition&

Searching

User ProfilingThe system should be able to distinguish between different users or groups of users.There are two basic types of profiles: Static – the profile is rarely, if ever, changed. Dynamic – the user’s profile is updated frequently.

Multiple dynamic profiles may be aggregated into static group profiles.User profiling is essential to effective performance modeling and capacity planning.

Architecture of a Web Personalization System