A Generic Transcoding Tool for Making Web Applications Adaptive

As personalization and device independence become prominent issues in Web development, tools to adapt existing Web Information Systems (WISs) are required. Still, current development approaches lack support for adding adaptation to existing WISs. This paper presents the Generic Adaptation Component (GAC), a transcoding tool for making Web applications adaptable and adaptive. It can be seamlessly integrated into existing Web architectures as an autonomous adaptation and personalization module. For configuring the GAC an RDF-based rule language is presented, allowing to define both content adaptation and context data update rules. Moreover, based on the document generation architecture of the AMACONT project a collection of transformation operations is provided to realize these rules. The main functionality of the GAC is elucidated by an example implementation.