A structured approach to personalize websites using the OO-H personalization framework

Abstract

Most current web engineering approaches don’t have clear criteria for personalization, nor a clear strategy that designers can use to classify users and formulate a personalization strategy for the web site at design time. In this paper, we present a structured approach to personalize websites based on three criteria: characteristics, user requirements and context. The users are classified into groups of users (profile groups) based on these criteria. For each group, a personalization strategy is defined by attaching personalization rules to its profile group. The work is presented in the context of the OO-H method which’ personalization framework can be instantiated by the web designer, and connected to any OO-H based site to empower it with personalization support. Finally, we introduce a tool that allows designers to specify and generate the personalizable client-side of a web application based on this approach.