Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Adaptive Hypertext and Hypermedia

Workshop Theme With the growing size, complexity and heterogeneity of current hypermedia systems, especially the World Wide Web, comes the need to provide more flexible mechanisms for delivering information to the user. That is, we require mechanisms which can modify documents on-the-fly in order to take the user's needs into account. Static hypertext documents suffer from an inability to be all things to all people; document and multimedia authors must write multiple documents for different users rather than a single document which can dynamicallY modify its content in order to address a particular user's knowledge or the context of delivery. A possible remedy for the negative effects of the traditional "one-size-fits-all " approach in the development of hypermedia systems is to equip them with the ability to adapt to the needs of their individual users. A possible way for achieving adaptivity is by modeling the users and tailoring the system's interactions to their goals, tasks and interests. In this sense, the notion of adaptive hypertext/hypermedia means a hypertext or hypermedia system which reflects some features of the user and/or characteristics of his/her system usage in a user model, and utilizes this model in order to adapt various aspects of the system's output to the user. This workshop was intended as an inter-disciplinary exploration into adaptive hypertext and other kinds of flexible hypertext systems. It aimed to draw together a number of research groups taking different approaches to adaptiv