Presentational adaptation aims to adapt the information and links being presented to the user with a view to reducing information overload by hiding details not of current interest. Techniques to accomplish presentational adaptation are conditional text, stretchtext, page variants, fragment variants and frame-based representations.
1. Conditional text: With this technique a concept is divided into chunks of text. Each chunk of text is associated with a condition indicating which type of user should be presented with the information chunk.
2. Stretchtext: This is a widely used technique to give users additional explanation related to the current topic. Clicking on a hotword moves the user to another related page or displays uncollapsed text.
3. Page variants: With this technique two or more variants of the pages associated with a concept are prepared as shown is figure 2.02. Each variant of the page presents information at a different level or in a different style and the system selects the most appropriate page variant for the user.
Figure 2.02 : Two presentations of a particular concept
4. Fragment variants: This is a more fine grained implementation of the page variant technique as shown in figure 2.03. With this technique each page is broken into a number of fragments and various variants of each fragment are prepared. As with the page variant technique the system selects the most appropriate version of each fragment to present to the user.
Figure 2.03 : Multiple variants of fragments on a page
5. Frame-based: When using the frame based technique a concept is represented in the form of a frame structure. Each slot of the frame contains a variant explanation of the same concept and also can be linked to other frames. A system using this technique also embodies a set of rules to calculate the most appropriate slot to be presented to a specific user.
Authored by Serengul Smith
E-mail to:
serengul1@mdx.ac.uk
School of Computing Science Middlesex University
Revised: September 1998
