Efficient Techniques for Adaptive Hypermedia

Adaptive hypermedia is a new direction of research within the area of adaptive and user model-based interfaces. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) systems build a model of the individual user and apply it for adaptation to that user, for example, to adapt the content of a hypermedia page to the user's knowledge and goals, or to suggest the most relevant links to follow. AH systems are now used in several application areas where the hyperspace is reasonably large and where a hypermedia application is expected to be used by users with different goals, knowledge and backgrounds. This chapter provides a brief survey of existing adaptive hypermedia techniques. Special attention is paid to the techniques implemented in the World Wide Web and to techniques which have been approved by an experimental study and shown to be effective. Among few others approved techniques we describe adaptive annotation techniques developed by our group at the Moscow State University.