Conclusion

The work reported in this paper is part of our ongoing research effort to develop adaptive web sites and increase their degree of automation. We list our main contributions below:

1.

We motivated the notion of adaptive web sites and analyzed the design space for such sites, locating previous work in that space.

2.

To demonstrate the feasibility of non-trivial adaptations, we presented a case study in the domain of synthesizing new index pages. We identified a key subproblem that is amenable to an automatic solution.

3.

Next, we presented the fully-implemented PageGather algorithm for discovering candidate index page contents based on visitor access patterns extracted from web server logs.

4.

We experimentally compared PageGather's output with the frequent sets discovered by the Apriori data mining algorithm and with human-authored index pages.

Finally, we identified the generation of complete and pure index pages as a key next step in the automation of index page synthesis. Index page synthesis itself is a step towards the long-term goal of change in view: adaptive sites that automatically suggest alternative organizations of their contents based on visitor access patterns.