I PROVIDING SERVICE-BASED PERSONALIZATION in AN
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PROVIDING SERVICE-BASED PERSONALIZATION IN AN ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA SYSTEM by Michael V. Yudelson Eng. System Analyst, Ivanovo State Power University, 2001 Candidate of Tech. Sci., Ivanovo State Power University, 2004 Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of School of Information Sciences in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Pittsburgh 2010 i UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH SCHOOL OF INFORMATION SCIENCES This dissertation was presented by Michael V. Yudelson It was defended on September 17, 2010 and approved by Daqing He, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences Heiko Spallek, Associate Professor, School of Dental Medicine Michael Spring, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences Vladimir Zadorozhny, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences Dissertation Advisor: Peter Brusilovsky, Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences ii Copyright © by Michael V. Yudelson 2010 iii PROVIDING SERVICE-BASED PERSONALIZATION IN AN ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA SYSTEM Michael V. Yudelson University of Pittsburgh, 2010 Adaptive hypermedia is one of the most popular approaches of personalized information access. When the field started to emerge, the expectation was that soon nearly all published hypermedia content could be adapted to the needs, preferences, and abilities of its users. However, after a decade and a half, the gap between the amount of total hypermedia content available and the amount of content available in a personalized way is still quite large. In this work we are proposing a novel way of speeding the development of new adaptive hypermedia systems. The gist of the approach is to extract the adaptation functionality out of the adaptive hypermedia system, encapsulate it into a standalone system, and offer adaptation as a service to the client applications. Such a standalone adaptation provider reduces the development of adaptation functionality to configuration and compliance and as a result creates new adaptive systems faster and helps serve larger user populations with adaptively accessible content. To empirically prove the viability of our approach, we developed PERSEUS – server of adaptation functionalities. First, we confirmed that the conceptual design of PERSEUS supports realization of a several of the widely used adaptive hypermedia techniques. Second, to demonstrate that the extracted adaptation does not create a significant computational bottleneck, we conducted a series of performance tests. The results show that PERSEUS is capable of providing a basis for implementing computationally challenging adaptation procedures and compares well with alternative, not-encapsulated adaptation solutions. As a result, even on modest hardware, large user populations can be served content adapted by PERSEUS. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1.0 INTRODUCTION................................................................................................. 1 1.1 WAYS TO ENHANCE ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA SYSTEMS .............................. 3 1.1.1 Content Authoring Support Tools ............................................................................... 3 1.1.2 Development Support Tools ....................................................................................... 5 1.2 PROBLEM STATEMENT, GOALS, AND HYPOTHESES ....................................... 6 1.3 DISSERTATION OUTLINE .......................................................................................... 9 2.0 BACKGROUND AND RELATED WORK ..................................................... 10 2.1 ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA SYSTEMS ..................................................................... 10 2.2 METHODS OF ADAPTIVE HYPERMEDIA ............................................................ 12 2.2.1 Direct Navigation ...................................................................................................... 13 2.2.2 Link Sorting .............................................................................................................. 14 2.2.3 Link Hiding ............................................................................................................... 15 2.2.4 Link Annotation ........................................................................................................ 16 2.2.5 Link Generation ........................................................................................................ 17 2.3 ADAPTATION REASONING ENGINES ................................................................... 19 2.4 ARCHITECTURE OF THE AHS ................................................................................ 22 2.4.1 Models ...................................................................................................................... 23 2.4.2 Processes And Data Streams ..................................................................................... 24 2.4.3 The Orchestration...................................................................................................... 28 v 2.5 DECOMPOSITION OF AHS AND COMPONENT REUSE .................................... 30 2.5.1 User Modeling And Its Separation From The AHS .................................................. 31 2.5.2 Separation Of The Content Model: Open-Corpus AHS ........................................... 33 2.5.3 Adaptation In The AHS: The Emerging Split ........................................................... 36 2.5.4 Summary ................................................................................................................... 41 2.6 METHODS OF ASSESSING ADAPTIVE SYSTEMS .............................................. 44 2.6.1 Evaluating Usability Of The AS/AHS ...................................................................... 44 2.6.2 Evaluating The Value of Adaptation: Holistic Approach ......................................... 46 2.6.3 Layered Evaluation of The Value of Adaptation ...................................................... 48 2.6.4 Performance Evaluation ............................................................................................ 51 2.6.5 Summary ................................................................................................................... 56 3.0 ADAPTATION FUNCTIONALITY AS STANDALONE SERVICE ........... 58 3.1 INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................................... 58 3.2 PERSEUS ........................................................................................................................ 59 3.3 PERSEUS IMPLEMENTATION ................................................................................. 63 3.4 CONCEPTUAL EVALUATION OF PERSEUS ........................................................ 67 3.4.1 Support Of Known Adaptation Techniques .............................................................. 67 3.4.2 Composition Of The Adaptation Process.................................................................. 71 3.5 ADAPTATION TECHNIQUES IMPLEMENTED IN PERSEUS ........................... 73 3.5.1 Social Navigation Support Adaptation Service ........................................................ 74 3.5.2 Topic-Based Navigation Support Adaptation Service .............................................. 77 3.5.3 Concept-Based Navigation Support Personalization Service ................................... 79 3.5.4 Link Generation (Recommendation) Personalization Service .................................. 84 3.6 PRE-STUDY OF PERSEUS’S SOCIAL NAVIGATION ADAPTATION .............. 85 3.6.1 Pilot-Test ................................................................................................................... 86 vi 3.6.2 Experimental Setup And Data Collection ................................................................. 86 3.6.3 Results ....................................................................................................................... 89 3.6.4 Pre-study Limitations ................................................................................................ 92 3.6.5 Pre-Study Summary .................................................................................................. 94 4.0 RESEARCH DESIGN ........................................................................................ 95 4.1 EXPERIMENT OVERVIEW ....................................................................................... 95 4.2 EXPERIMENTAL SYSTEMS SETUP ...................................................................... 101 4.2.1 Data Collection And Implementation ..................................................................... 101 4.2.2 Data Model And Configuration .............................................................................. 105 4.3 HARDWARE AND SOFTWARE .............................................................................. 116 4.4 COMPREHENSIVE HYPOTHESES ........................................................................ 117 4.4.1 Parallel Processing Capacity-planning/Soak Tests ................................................. 117 4.4.2 Baseline Comparison Sequential Processing Benchmark Tests ............................. 118 4.4.3 Size Of The Supported User Population ................................................................. 121 4.4.4 Number Of Requests In The System ...................................................................... 122 5.0 RESULTS .......................................................................................................... 123 5.1 PARALLEL PROCESSING