MASHA: A multi-agent system handling user and device adaptivity of Web sites

Abstract

A user that navigates on the Web using different devices should be characterized by a global profile, which represents his behaviour when using all these devices. Then, the user's profile could be usefully exploited when interacting with a site agent that is able to provide useful recommendations on the basis of the user's interests, on one hand, and to adapt the site presentation to the device currently exploited by the user, on the other hand. However, it is not suitable to construct such a global profile by a software running on the exploited device since this device (e.g., a mobile phone or a palmtop) may have limited resources. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a multi-agent architecture, called MASHA, handling user and device adaptivity of Web sites, in which each device is provided with a client agent that autonomously collects information about the user's behaviour associated to just that device. However, the user profile contained in this client is continuously updated with information coming from a unique server agent, associated with the user. Such information is collected by the server agent from the different devices exploited by the user, and represents a global user profile. The third component of this architecture, called adapter agent, is capable to generate a personalized representation of the Web site, containing some useful recommendations derived by both an analysis of the user profile and the suggestions coming from other users exploiting the same device.