Adaptive navigation support is a specific group of technologies that support user navigation in hyperspace, by adapting to the goals, preferences and knowledge of the individual user. These technologies, originally developed in the field of adaptive hypermedia, are becoming increasingly important in several adaptive Web applications, ranging from Web-based adaptive hypermedia to adaptive virtual reality. This chapter provides a brief introduction to adaptive navigation support, reviews major adaptive navigation support technologies and mechanisms, and illustrates these with a range of examples.

Social navigation support is a new approach for helping users to find their way through complex navigation-based environments of hypermedia by following the “footprints ” of other users. A significant challenge to social navigation support encounters is to construct a trail of beneficial footprints. Traditional social navigation support considers the user clicks to be “footprints.” However, in our work we have found that simple click-based footprints lack information about the true intention of the users. We evaluated the benefit of considering time spent reading each page when calculating “footprints ” for social navigation support. In this paper, we present a discussion of the possible problems with simple click-based footprints and the advantages of adding the measurement of time spent on pages into the footprints. We have studied this in an educational application, which helps students find relevant information in online tutorials, in the domain of Cprogramming. 1

The goal of this paper is to detail the integration of two “social Web ” technologies – social search and social navigation – and to highlight the benefits of such integration on two levels. Firstly, both technologies harvest and harness “community wisdom ” and in an integrated system each of the search and navigation components can benefit from the additional community wisdom gathered by the other when assisting users to locate relevant information. Secondly, by integrating search and browsing we facilitate the development of a unique interface that effectively blends search and browsing functionality as part of a seamless social information access service. This service allows users to effectively combine their search and browsing behaviors. In this paper we will argue that this integration provides significantly more than the simple sum of the parts. ACM Classification: H.3.1 [Content Analysis and Indexing]: Indexing method; H.3.7 [Digital Libraries]: User issues;

Despite the fact that adaptive hypermedia techniques have proven their ability to provide user guidance and orientation in hyperspace, we do not currently see the widespread adoption of these techniques. A couple of reasons may explain this phenomenon. One of them is the current lack of re-usability and interoperability between adaptive techniques/systems, which – to some degree – originates in the so-called “open corpus problem” found in adaptive hypermedia. In this article, we analyze this problem in a popular arena: adaptive hypermedia systems with an emphasis on education. The origins and effects of the open corpus problem are discussed, and recent approaches are demonstrated that have – in one way or the other – developed as strategies for solving the open corpus problem. We summarize these findings and discuss how solution strategies can be successfully employed in the future, enabling adaptive hypermedia techniques within open, dynamic information spaces, such as the Semantic Web.

Web page annotation and adaptive navigation support are two active, but independent research directions focused on the same goal: expanding the functionality of the Web as a hypertext system. The goal of the AnnotatEd system presented in this paper has been to integrate annotation and adaptive navigation support into a single value-added service where the components can reinforce each other and create new unique attributes. This paper describes the implementation of AnnotatEd from early prototypes to the current version, which has been explored in several contexts. We summarize some lessons we learned during the development process and which defined the current functionality of the system. We also present the results of several classroom studies of the system. These results demonstrate the importance of the browsing-based information access supported by AnnotatEd and the value of both the annotation and navigation support functionalities offered by the system.

Adaptive hypermedia systems traditionally focus on providing personalised learning services for formal or informal learners. The learning material is typically sourced from a proprietary set of closed corpus content. A fundamental problem with this type of architecture is the need for handcrafted learning objects, enriched with considerable amounts of metadata. The challenge of generating adaptive and personalised hypertext presentations from open source content promises a dramatic improvement of the choice of information shown to the learner. This paper proposes an architecture of such a dynamic hypertext generation system and its use in an authentic learning environment. The system is evaluated in terms of educational benefit, as well as the satisfaction of the users testing the system. Concluding from this evaluation, the paper will explore the future work necessary to further enhance the system performance and learning experience.

This paper explores two ways to help students locate most relevant resources in educational digital libraries. One method gives a more comprehensive access to educational resources, through multiple pathways of information access, including browsing and information visualization. The second method is to access personalized information through social navigation support. This paper presents the details of the Knowledge Sea II system for comprehensive personalized access to educational resources and also presents the results of a classroom study. The study delivered a convincing argument for the importance of providing multiple information presentations modes, showing that only about 10 % of all resource accesses were made through the traditional search interface. We have also collected some solid evidence in favor of the social navigation support.

Abstract. Learning from examples is a common and powerful approach when mastering the art of programming. In our classroom studies of WebEx and NavEx, students highly praised the systems. However, the broader dissemination of this approach was not very successful due to the lack of content – annotated examples. This paper presents the study results in example-based programming learning by annotating examples. The classroom study confirmed that community successfully filtered out good and bad annotations and improved the quality of the annotations. In addition, the annotating example assignment was perceived highly helpful in understanding. 1.

Abstract: Development of educational ontologies is a step towards creation of sharable and reusable adaptive educational systems. Ontology as a conceptual courseware structure may work as a mind tool for effective teaching and as a visual navigation interface to the learning objects. The paper discusses an approach to the practical ontology development and presents the designed ontology for teaching/learning C programming.

Abstract. In this paper we deal with personalized navigation in an open information space. Our aim is to support effective orientation in increasing amount of information accessible through the Web. We present a method for personalized navigation based on social navigation where the information space is represented by an ontology. Navigational information is obtained by following user footsteps. It is attached to information fragment mapped to the user goal and to description of this goal using an ontology. This information is used later to show the way to similar goals. We use ontology representation of the information space that supports the effective navigation and the navigational ability to deal with frequent changes of information content in open environments. We demonstrate the proposed method in the context of developed software tool PENA for personalized navigation support in labor supply domain.