Modular Content Personalization Service Architecture for E-Commerce Applications

Personalized Web portals are becoming more and more popular. What is unsatisfying with existing sites is that the scope of the personalized content they provide is typically that of the underlying site. Providers of such personalized content typically develop their own, proprietary personalized Web portal. To use different personalization features of different sites users have to hop from one personalized site to another and provide different user profile information there. Therefore, we propose a flexible architecture in which a personalization mediator acts as a broker of modular personalization services between providers of personalized content and users that are interested in such personalized content. In this architecture, the providers of personalized content publish their personalization services via a unified interface to this mediator. A user provides its profile information to the mediator which in turn finds and calls the most suitable service which finally delivers the most targeted personalized content. The benefit of our approach is that users get an easier and unified access to a notional unlimited collection of personalization services by the mediator. For the providers, the approach allows different sites with different personalization capabilities to embed their personalization services in a generic infrastructure for applications like personalized Web portals.