Portals provide users with a central point of access to a wide variety of content, data, and applications throughout an enterprise. Portals ensure a consistent look and feel regardless of the source and format of the information or applications. Various types of portals exist today, like corporate portals, government portals, regional portals, domain portals, and many others.

Statement of Problem

The amount of information available through portals has grown exponentially over the last decade and finding the right information is becoming increasingly complex and time consuming. Information overload becomes a serious threat, which may cause productivity slowdown and users’ frustration. This imposes new requirements for leading edge Web portals: they have to efficiently manage the increasing information overload and at the same time provide users with an intuitive and easy-to-use access to wide spectrum of information resources and applications.  In addition, modern portals have to take into account the users’ information needs and the context in which they are acting.

Objectives

The overall goal of this project is to find an architectural solution for the next generation Web portals. We are aiming to overcome the drawbacks and limitations of static portals and make them more intuitive, dynamic, and flexible. In this project, we propose to provide Web portals with the following characteristics:

• Context-awareness. By taking into account the context in which the user is acting, we can efficiently adjust the portal to fit the user’s current situation. For example depending on device from which the portal is accessed. This would allow changing page layout and navigation scheme to fit the user’s device, which in turn would improve the overall user experience.
• Adaptivity. Adaptive Web portals learn from the users’ behavior and make assumptions about their information needs and potential behavior in future sessions. This allows targeting the right content and delivering it to users at the right time.

Methodology

In order to achieve the objectives of this project we are going to:

• Analyse user behavior in Web portals and develop user models that reflect user and behavioristic aspects;
• Develop context models that semantically describe all aspects related to the context in which portals might be accessed by users;
• Develop and/or select reasoning and statistical methods to perform prediction of user behavior based on the context and user models;
• Develop prototypes and adaptation components (page layouts, navigation schemes, and portlets) that implement the proposed features;
• Evaluate the prototypes in real world scenarios.