An adaptive system for the personalized access to news

Personalization is one of the keys for the success of web services. In this paper we present SeAN (Server for Adaptive News), an adaptive system for the personalized access to news servers on the WWW. The aims of the system are (i) to select the sections (topics) and news in the server that are most relevant for each user, (ii) to customize the detail level of each news item to the user's characteristics and (iii) to select the advertisements that are most appropriate for each page and user. In the paper we discuss the functionalities of the system and we present the choices we made in its design. In particular, we focus on the techniques we adopted for structuring the news archive, for creating and maintaining the user model and for generating the personalized hypertext for browsing the news server.