A reusable personalization model in web application design

Abstract

Personalization of web sites has become an important issue in web modeling methods. Many of these methods use similar approaches to specify personalization. However even with similar (personalization) requirements the resulting implementations differ. The consequence is that we cannot reuse the same (personalization) specification. This paper presents a generic extension for existing conceptual modeling approaches to address the particulars associated with the design and specification of dynamic personalization. We allow the designer to specify at design time how the website will be personalized (at runtime). We claim that the personalization specification can be mapped to different web modeling methods so we can define this specification once and reuse it for different (development) environments. For this purpose a high level (generic) language based on rules (Personalization Rules Modeling language) is presented. Finally we describe how PRM rules can be easily mapped to the rule representation for a commercial rule engine.