Research

Recognizing the value of internet technologies, companies started to establish intranets to provide their employees with a central point of access to enterprise specific information. Initially, intranets focused on presenting the most valuable and widely used information to employees providing them with quick and efficient information access. But the amount of information accessible via those intranets quickly grew and finding the right information became more complex and time consuming.

Many companies successfully introduced Web Portals to manage the upcoming information overflow. Web Portals provide users with a central point of access in a highly personalized manner. They allow providing information and applications based on the role of a user within the enterprise. Understanding the role of a given user and his information needs allows efficient targeting of the content. Today, Web Portals are comprised of a huge amount of content. They have grown tremendously and again it becomes more time consuming to find and access the right information throughout a particular context. Information overflow is becoming a productivity threat again and users once more fear to get lost in hyperspace.

Contextual Portals propagate the next generation of Web Portals. The goal is to come to a more adaptive, adaptable, dynamic and context-aware type of Web Portals, where the main idea is to overcome drawbacks of static Web Portals, mainly by taking into account which context a user is acting in and by learning from a user's behavior in order to make assumptions about his potential behavior throughout future sessions. The aim is to let the system self-adapt to better suit users' needs - in order to better support their typical behavior and to better manage information overflow.

The new concepts then aim to improve certain selected aspects of Web Portals: the presentation of the navigation, the presentation of the page layout, the way in which contextual information is exchanged across applications and across pages, the way in which users are notified about context-changes and the mechanisms that allow single users to have multiple (behavior) profiles.

A context adaptive Portal collects knowledge during users’ interaction with the Portal, filters and stores the collected knowledge and finally makes use of it and additional context information during future sessions in order to adapt the Portal to better suit users needs. It improves supporting users’ typical behavior by taking into account contextual information and by learning from a user's previous behavior.

Research Areas

• Web Intelligence in general

• World Wide Wisdom Web (W4)
• • Meta-Knowledge Discovery and Representation
  • Web Inference Engines
  • Information and Knowledge Markets
  • New Social Interaction Paradigms
  • Social and Psychological Contexts
  • Regularities and Laws of W4

• Social Networks and Social Intelligence
• • Social Network Mining
  • Web Site Clustering
  • Link Topology and Site Hierarchy
  • Virtual and Web Communities
  • Web-Based Cooperative Work
  • Knowledge Community Formation and Support
  • Ubiquitous Computing

• Web Mining and Farming
• • Text Mining
  • Data Stream Mining
  • Multimedia Data Mining
  • Web Content Mining
  • Web Log and Usage Mining
  • Learning User Profiles
  • Context Sensitive Web Mining
  • Web Information Clustering
  • Web Page Clustering and Mining
  • Web Site Classification
  • Web Information Indexing
  • Data Warehousing
  • Web Farming and Warehousing

• Semantics and Ontology Engineering
• • Ontology-Based Information Extraction and Retrieval
  • Ontology-Based Web Mining
  • Web-Based Ontology Learning
  • Semantic Web

• Web Agents
• • Global Information Foraging
  • Macroscopic Behavior Modeling

• Web Information Filtering and Retrieval
• • Automatic Cataloging and Indexing
  • Clustering-Based Recommender Systems
  • Collaborative Filtering and Recommendation
  • Hybrid Recommendation
  • Information Retrieval Criteria and Evaluations
  • Web Information Categorization and Ranking
  • Proxy and Cache Techniques
  • Web Prediction and Prefetching
  • Distributed Web Search
  • Specifications for Web Information Extraction Process
  • Web Crawling Systems
  • Search Engines and Meta-search Engines

• Intelligent Human-Web Interaction
• • Adaptive Web Interfaces
  • Context-Aware Computing
  • Learning User Profiles
  • Personalized Interfaces
  • Personalized Web Sites
  • Remembrance Agents
  • Multimedia Representation
  • Visualization of Information and Knowledge
  • Social and Psychological Issues

• Web Support Systems
• • Information Retrieval Support Systems
  • Web Site Navigation Support Systems
  • Recommender Support Systems
  • Web-Based Decision Support Systems
  • Soft Computing