AH 12 years later: a comprehensive survey of adaptive hypermedia methods and techniques

Abstract

A hypermedia application offers its users much freedom to navigate through a large hyperspace. Adaptive hypermedia (AH) offers personalized content, presentation, and navigation support. Many adaptive hypermedia systems (AHS) are tightly integrated with one specific application and/or use a limited number of techniques and methods. This makes it difficult to capture all of them in one generic model. In this paper we examine adaptation questions stated in the very beginning of the AH era and elaborate on their recent interpretations. We will reconsider design issues for application independent generic AHS, review open questions of system extensibility introduced in adjacent research fields and try to come up with an up-to-date taxonomy of adaptation techniques and an extensive set of requirements for a new adaptive system reference model or architecture, to be developed in the future.

Keywords:

• Adaptive hypermedia
• User modeling
• Adaptive techniques
• Reference model

Acknowledgements

This work has been supported by the NWO GAF Project. We would like to thank the journal editors and anonymous reviewers for providing detailed and constructive comments that helped us to improve this paper.

Notes

1. In De Bra et al. (1992), the model actually did not have a name, but its main construct was the “tower”, hence our naming here and in later publications about the model.

2. In Brusilovsky, the term “adaptive presentation” was used for what we mainly consider to be “content adaptation”.

3. GRAPPLE EU FP7 STREP project—http://www.grapple-project.org/.

4. Adaptive Learning Spaces project under the Minerva Program.