Creating Adaptive Web Sites Using Personalisation Techniques: A Unified, Integrated Approach and the Role of Evaluation

This chapter introduces a comprehensive review in personalization techniques and presents key features of personalized e-services. A framework is also introduced for integrating different personalization techniques into a single unified approach along the various segments of the customer decision process and it argues over the enhancement of the traditional personalization chain with an evaluation phase from which the results can provide feedback into the personalization techniques. Finally, based on the underlined approaches and assumptions, an extended personalization architecture is proposed including the evaluation layer. The vision of the authors is to embed a learning capability (through a fuzzy logic system, a neural network etc.) into the personalization techniques so that they avoid making the same unsuccessful suggestions in terms of links and features not being valued by the user. By achieving this goal, personalization-enabled web sites will behave as adaptive and evolutionary information systems.