Authoring support for adaptive hypermedia applications

A hypermedia application offers its users a lot of freedom to navigate through a large hyperspace. The rich link structure of the hypermedia application can not only cause users to get lost in the hyperspace, but can also lead to comprehension problems because users read information in an order not foreseen by the author. Adaptive hypermedia systems (or AHS for short) aim at overcoming these problems by providing adaptive navigation support and by providing adaptive content. We have developed a reference model for adaptive hypermedia applications: AHAM (for Adaptive Hypermedia Application Model), which is an extension of the Dexter hypermedia reference model (Halasz et al., 1990, 1994). The goal of AHAM is to describe adaptive hypermedia applications, especially from the point of view of authors designing such applications. AHAM divides an AHS into a Domain Model (DM), User Model (UM) and Teaching Model (TM). This paper describes support tools that help authors to create these three parts of an adaptive hypermedia application, and to assure that these parts together form a usable and consistent complete application.