Personalization by website transformation: Theory and practice

  • Authors:
  • Saverio Perugini

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, University of Dayton 300 College Park, Dayton, OH 45469-2160, USA

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2010

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Abstract

We present an analysis of a progressive series of out-of-turn transformations on a hierarchical website to personalize a user's interaction with the site. We formalize the transformation in graph-theoretic terms and describe a toolkit we built which enumerates all of the traversals enabled by every possible complete series of these transformations in any site and computes a variety of metrics while simulating each traversal therein to qualify the relationship between a site's structure and the cumulative effect of support for the transformation in a site. We employed this toolkit in two websites. The results indicate that the transformation enables users to experience a vast number of paths through a site not traversable through browsing and demonstrate that it supports traversals with multiple steps, where the semblance of a hierarchy is preserved, as well as shortcuts directly to the desired information.