ANATAGONOMY: A personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web

This paper describes a personalized newspaper on the World Wide Web (WWW), called ANATAGONOMY. The main feature of this system is that the newspaper is personalized without asking the users to specify their preferences explicitly. The system monitors user operations on the articles and reflects them in the user profiles. Differently from conventional newspapers on the WWW, our system sends an interaction agent implemented as a Java applet to the client side, and the agent monitors the user operations and creates each user's newspaper pages automatically. The server side manages user profiles and anticipates how interesting an article would be for each user. The interaction agent on the client side manages all the user interactions, including the automatic layout of pages. Our system has page multiple layout algorithms and the user can switch from one view to another anytime, according to the preference or machine environment. On one of the views, the user can even see all the articles sequentially without performing any operations. We evaluated a scheme in which the user scores each article explicitly, and a scheme in which all the personalization is done automatically. The results show that automatic personalization works well when some parameters are set properly. (C) 1997 Academic Press Limited.