Navigating the Web: Possibilities and Practicalities for Adaptive Navigational Support

John Eklund Faculty of Education PO Box 222, Lindfield NSW 2070 Australia University of Technology, Sydney Email: j.eklund@UTS.edu.au

Romain Zeiliger CNRS-IRPEACS 93, chemin des Mouilles, BP167 69131 Ecully Cedex, France Email: zeiliger@irpeacs.fr

Abstract

The World Wide Web (Web) as a wide area network based on hypertext represents a rapidly changing and vast information resource with direct application and relevance in an educational setting. The two greatest issues associated with the educational use of the Web are of comprehension and navigation. Users often report becoming lost in hyperspace, following links which are unproductive in terms of meeting their original learning goals or information seeking tasks. While Web browsers such as Netscape offer the user a range of navigational tools to orient themselves in the information space, the Web remains a predominantly passive medium in its ability to adapt to the individual user.

Adaptive systems, on the other hand, may dynamically modify information presentation and links to provide the user with an individualized information space whose adapted structure is based on a dynamic model of the user's current needs. Particularly in a closed corpus of education material where the learner has a specific learning goal, research in adaptive systems has been very active. An adaptive system based on hypertext (AHS) which provides navigational support is able to suggest a preferred path through the hyperspace on the basis of a user model.

In this paper we provide an overview of the area of AHS, a number of systems are outlined, and we consider the possibility of extrapolating the architectures and design principles of these systems to the open corpus scenario found in learning and information retrieval on the Web.

Keywords

Adaptive Hypermedia Systems, Information Retrieval, Navigation, User-model, Web

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