Institutional Websites Personalization Using Macro and Micro User Profiles

Institutional sites usually have a great volume of documents and a heavy navigation structure, requiring complex users browsing behavior. In order to allow users to find quickly and easily some information relevant to their usage it is imperative rethinking the structure of the site and the design of each individual page with relevant links to information concerning each user role, i.e., to be able to customize which information is more adequate for each user. This paper presents a personalization approach specifically designed for institutional sites, supporting personalization in two complementary levels, called respectively macro and micro user profiles. Basically, the macro user profile aims to model features related to organizational roles that are common to groups of users within the same organizational unit (for example, department, division, etc) whereas the micro user profile aims to concern preferences of specific individuals. The paper also presents the main aspects of our personalization approach, step by step explanation of an associated personalization engine and some preliminary results of an actual case study using the prototype built for its validation.