Personalisation of web information systems – A term rewriting approach

Personalisation of web information systems (WISs) means customisation of the presented data content to the needs of users, restricting the available functionality to the goals and preferences of users, and tailoring the web presentation according to used devices and style options. This paper primarily concentrates on the customisation of functionality by making all those operations available to a user that are needed to achieve a specified goal, and by organising them in an action scheme called plot that is in accordance with the behavioural preferences of the user.Plots are formalised by algebraic expressions in Kleene algebras with tests (KATs). Then personalisation can be formalised as an optimisation problem with equational preference rules, for which a term rewriting approach is proposed. In a second step the approach is extended to conditional term rewriting thereby dispensing with the particular need to associate preference rules with user profiles. Finally, the approach is refined by taking content specifications via extended views and abstract programs on these views into account. This leads us to reformulating the personalisation problem in higher-order dynamic logic.