Using Microformats to Personalize Web Experience

Abstract

As envisioned by its creator, the WorldWideWeb gathers billions of users from different communities all over the world. A recent evolution of the Web has been witnessed with microformats, which allow authors to semantically annotate the contents of Web documents (webpages, blog posts, news articles, RSS feeds, etc.), and enable intersoftware interactions by exporting this annotated content to external applications (calendars, address books, etc.). However, Web users still originate from different communities, and thus follow their own local semantics (referred to as context in this paper) for data interpretation and representation. Hence, there is a need to transform Web content created according to the author’s context into the different contexts of its readers. We refer to such transformation process as personalization. In this paper, we identify users’ requirements for Web content personalization and we present a solution that takes advantage of microformats in order to enhance users’ experience on the Web with contextualized information. We show how microformats offer a great opportunity to adapt the contents of Web documents to different users’ contexts.