Dynamic Adaptation of Content and Structure in Electronic Encyclopaedias

Adaptive functionality has been applied successfully in many areas ranging from user interfaces to hypermedia systems. Digital libraries, and electronic encyclopaedias in particular, have rarely made use of the power of adaptation, though. In this paper, an approach to include adaptation into encyclopaedic environments is presented. The proposal covers a set of adaptation techniques. They enable the system to explain technical terms and replace domain specific expressions with “plain” words automatically. Moreover, specific terms can be linked to further articles automatedly. Blacklisting, whitelisting and general link alteration are employed in order to assure quality standards and to provide users with more appropriate hyperlinks. With navigation support based on the automatic insertion of trails and suggestions of potentially interesting articles, the user’s navigation in the system can be facilitated. We propose a flexible framework for the implementation of this adaptive functionality in a web-based environment. The system is based on a traditional client-server architecture, where the server-side components perform the actual adaptation. The concept is modular and easily extensible. Apart from electronic encyclopaedias, the proposed functionality can be applied in areas such as domain-specific databases, archives handling encyclopaedic knowledge or learner support systems.