Mechanisms for Context-Informed Adaptive Hypermedia

Abstract

The Cross-fertilisation potential of the work being undertaken by both the Adaptive Hypermedia and Context-Aware communities is considerable. In particular, the benefits to Adaptive Hypermedia constitute a method for handling contextual influences without the need to extend deep models to accommodate axes of marginal interest or high complexity. The benefit to the field of Context-awareness lies in the opportunity to examine application areas where Context is not the only concern within the logic of the system, it is rather a set of influences on advanced, complex semantic structures. This project is concerned with an initial investigation of the mechanisms for creating Context-Informed Adaptive Hypermedia, specifically in the area of influencing an educational Adaptive Hypermedia . A definition of context is provided, along with the design, implementation and evaluation of an example architecture. The project was composed of three main phases: initially, a detailed survey of Adaptive Hypermedia and Context-Aware Systems was undertaken, this was followed by the outline of an architecture for Context-Informed Adaptive Hypermedia. Detailed design of the mechanisms for applying Contextual Axes to Adaptive Hypermedia was supplemented with the Prototyping and testing of these mechanisms with an extant eLearning Adaptive Hypermedia System. A Paper Presentation on this project was given to the Workshop on Advanced Context Modelling Managing and Reasoning at the Sixth International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing under the tile `Context-Informed Adaptive Hypermedia? with authors Alexander O?Connor, Owen Conlan and Vincent Wade.