A flexible and efficient presentation-architecture for adaptive hypermedia: description and technical evaluation

Means of achieving personalization in the Web are adaptive hypermedia techniques and the flexible composition of learning content from individual learning objects. If the objects are represented in a format different from the presentation format (e.g. as XML as opposed to HTML), a potentially expensive transformation process is required. Furthermore, caching becomes impractical depending on the degree of personalization, as the dynamic information is available at presentation time only and varies for each user. In this paper we present a flexible and efficient presentation pipeline based on a model-view-controller architecture, which overcomes performance problems and couples caching and personalization. It transforms single learning objects and uses a view-layer for adaptive presentation and navigation support that provides additional advantages such as incremental rendering and the easy adaption to different layout styles. Both theoretical and simulation results prove the efficiency of this architecture.