A Methodological Approach for Incorporating Adaptive Navigation Techniques into Web Applications

The incorporation of Adaptive Navigation techniques into Web applications is a complex task. The conceptual specification of the navigation must consider the preferences and needs of users, as well as different implementation alternatives from the same navigational structure. However, there is a lack of methods that rule this integration. This work proposes a methodological approach that allow describing adaptive navigation characteristics of a Web application at a high abstraction level. We introduce a User Modelling process and a set of concepts that permit to incorporate two types of adaptive navigation techniques into the navigational description of a Web application. These techniques select and sort the links of a page, according to their relevance for a given user. The steps of the methodology are illustrated through a case study.