Steering Committee

Research and Development Team

Research activity in 1999

"Servizi Telematici Adattativi" is a three years project sponsored by Telecom Italia within the "Cantieri Multimediali" initiative, which involves three Italian Universities, each of them responsible for a different project, sharing the goal of promoting activities on multimedia services.

The agreement between the University of Torino (Dipartimento di Informatica) and Telecom Italia for the project "Servizi Telematici Adattativi" lasts from May 1^st, 1997 to April 30^th, 2000.

The main goal of this project is the design and development of a prototype to support sales in Web stores, focusing on the personalization of the interaction with the system users, i.e. on tailoring the interaction with customers to their preferences and needs.

This has recently become a hot topic of research, as a consequence of the quick and world-wide expansion of Internet; in fact, lots of Web malls and shops exist and are accessed by heterogeneous users, with different expertise and interests, who may need support to explore the catalogues and select the products for purchase.

In order to approach the overall goal mentioned above, we have designed a system architecture which satisfies the following requirements:

• The Web store architecture is based on a technology that enables a generic Internet user to access the virtual store, without imposing severe restrictions on the needed equipment type (e.g., no strict restrictions have to be imposed on the computer and browser used to connect to the store).


• The prototype is configurable and can be used to create multiple instances of Web stores, selling products belonging to different domains. In general, the system is suited to domains where fairly complex products are presented in a catalog accessible to different types of users: in fact, in those domains, non-expert customers need special support to take their decisions.


• The Web store adapts the presentation of products to the user, customizing the layout and content of the catalog pages on the basis of the user model. In particular, given the whole information available about a product, the system tailors the selection of the type of information to be presented to the customer’s interests. Moreover, it tailors the amount of provided data to the user’s disposition towards the acquisition of information. Finally, the system selects the (more or less technical) linguistic style to be used in the description on the basis of the user’s domain expertise. As far as the selection of the items to be suggested to the user is concerned, the Web store also adapts the selection of products to the user's preferences, suggesting those most suited to her/his needs.


• The system takes the initiative during the interaction with the user, actively guiding her/him in the exploration of the store and in the selection of items. In order to be fully co-operative, the system takes the initiative also in cases where the user does not explicitly ask for that.


• Stereotypical information about the characteristics and preferences typical of different customer classes are exploited to initialize the model of the user accessing the Web store since the beginning of the interaction. This is essential to personalize the interaction with new customers. Moreover, the user’s behavior is monitored while s/he browses the Web store, in order to collect precise information about her/his preferences and expertise; this information can be used to revise the user model by means of dynamic user modeling techniques.

The main result obtained in 1999 was the design and development of the architecture of SETA, a prototype toolkit for the creation of Web stores.

The SETA system is based on a multi-agent architecture, where specialized agents have been designed to carry on the activities of the front-end of a Web store. The distribution of tasks is essential to support a reactive adaptivity of the system during the interaction with the user. In fact, in order to tailor the system's behavior to the user's needs, a complex activity is needed, where several specific tasks interact in a non-trivial way. For example, it is necessary to collect information about the user’s preferences, to select the products most suited to her/him and to dynamically generate the personalized hypertextual pages. These complex activities require specific expertise and must be carried on in parallel.

The multiagent system has been developed by exploiting the facilities offered by an agent building tool (Objectspace Voyager), which supports a seamless distribution of agents, a parallel execution of the agents code and a sophisticated communication among agents, where synchronous, asynchronous and multicast messages can be exchanged.

The Web store shell developed in 1999 is a distributed multiagent system and supports the creation of adaptive Web stores instantiated on different sales domains. The system extends the functionalities of the first prototype, developed in 1998; in particular:

• The agent managing the user models was extended to exploit user modeling acquisition rules for the dynamic revision of the user models during the interaction with the customer. Such rules have been tested and enhanced in order to obtain information about different aspects of the user model, such as the user’s interests, domain expertise and preferences for product properties.


• The agent in charge of the generation of the catalog pages has been extended with additional personalization rules. These rules are based on the contents of the user model and are exploited to choose: the type of information about products which the descriptions should focus on; the technicality level of the descriptions (e.g., more or less technical terms can be used, depending on the user’s expertise); the amount of information to be included in the catalog pages and the layout of the pages, the graphical layout.


• Special functionalities have been introduced to enable the user to ask for specific information about products; for instance, comparison tables, which can be created “on the fly” by choosing the items to be compared and the features to be analyzed.

1999 Publications

L. Ardissono, A. Goy, R. Meo, G. Petrone, L. Console, L. Lesmo, C. Simone and P. Torasso. A configurable system for the construction of adaptive virtual stores. World Wide Web journal (WWW), Vol. 2, N. 3, pp. 143-159, 1999, Baltzer Science Publishers.

L. Ardissono and A. Goy. Tailoring the Interaction With Users in Electronic Shops. Proceedings 7^th Conference on User Modeling, pp. 35-44, Springer-Verlag. Banff, Canada, 1999.

L. Ardissono, L. Console and I. Torre. Exploiting user models for personalizing news presentations. Proceedings 2^nd Workshop on Adaptive Systems and User Modeling on the WWW, pp. 13-20, Banff, Canada, 1999.