AHA : a generic adaptive hypermedia system

Since early 1994 the course "2L670: Hypermedia Structures and Systems" has been available through the Web. It is currently part of the curriculum for computing science and related fields at six universities in The Netherlands and Belgium, and occasionally offered to students from other institutes as well. The software used to deliver this course over the Web has evolved from a static hyperdocument to a versatile adaptive hypermedia system that can be used for many purposes. We call the system AHA, which stands for Adaptive Hypermedia Architecture. The core of the AHA system consists of an engine which maintains a user-model based on knowledge about concepts. Knowledge is generated by reading pages and by taking tests. The (textual or multimedia) content of a page can be adapted by means offragment variants. The (hyper)links are annotated by changing the color of the link anchor (the link text or the border in case of images). The color scheme can be configured by the author and overridden by the user, to choose between link annotation and link hiding. When desired, link removal can also easily be implemented. The adaptive hypermedia software can be used for all kinds of applications, not necessarily limited to education (which is what its primary purpose was). It is written (almost) entirely in Java and thus portable to different computing platforms. It is freely available for non-commercial use. keywords: user modeling, conditional content, link hiding, link annotation.

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