Adapting to the Level of Experience of the User in Mixed-Initiative Web Self-Service Applications

Web self service applications deliver technical support to a diverse group of typically anonymous end users. Such applications have to be able to adapt themselves to the level of experience of the user and deliver consistent problems solutions. Since most users are not uniquely identifiable, creating a long term user model is not feasible. The knowledge in the application has to be extremely easy to create, update and maintain by a team of subject matter experts that are distributed world-wide and are not experienced in knowledge modeling. We describe an approach to build a user adaptive mixed initiative web self service application that can operate under these conditions and illustrate the ideas by analyzing an application.