Adaptive Hypermedia: An Attempt to Analyze and Generalize

Adaptive hypermedia is a new area of research at the crossroads of hypermedia, adaptive systems and intelligent tutoring systems. The goals of this paper are to provide a brief overview of this area and to synthesize a generalized view of the organization of existing adaptive hypermedia systems. We discuss three important questions: why do we need adaptive hypermedia (AH), where can it be useful, and what can be adapted in adaptive hypermedia. Then we introduce a generalized view of internal knowledge structure of AH systems and use it to uncover the basic approaches to hyperspace structuring in AH systems and basic methods of adaptation related with these approaches.