Building Adaptive Presentations with AHA! 2.0

An increasing number of Website developers try to provide some kind of “personalization”. In this paper we show how the designers (called “authors” in this paper) can build their adaptive presentations using the AHA! system (for Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture). Most existing Adaptive Hypermedia Systems are special-purpose, aimed at one specific application or application area (mostly educational applications). AHA! also started out as an educational system but now it is being turned into a general-purpose tool through a grant from the NLnet Foundation. AHA! aims at bringing adaptivity to a wide variety of applications such as on-line information systems, on-line help systems, museum and shopping websites, in addition to the area of on-line textbooks. In this paper we first present the overall architecture of the system. Then, we describe the main steps of the authoring process. In this part we present two new authoring interfaces which support the author in defining the domain/adaptation model. Finally, we show how the adaptive application is presented to the end-user. Information about AHA!, including an adaptive tutorial, can be found on the AHA! website http://aha.win.tue.nl/.