Using Microformats to Personalize Web Experience

As envisioned by its creator, the WorldWideWeb gath- ers billions of users from different communities all over the world. A recent evolution of the Web has been wit- nessed with microformats, which allow authors to seman- tically annotate the contents of Web documents (webpages, blog posts, news articles, RSS feeds, etc.), and enable inter- software interactions by exporting this annotated content to external applications (calendars, address books, etc.). However, Web users still originate from different communi- ties, and thus follow their own local semantics (referred to as context in this paper) for data interpretation and repre- sentation. Hence, there is a need to transform Web content created according to the author's context into the different contexts of its readers. We refer to such transformation pro- cess as personalization. In this paper, we identify users' re- quirements for Web content personalization and we present a solution that takes advantage of microformats in order to enhance users' experience on the Web with contextualized information. We show how microformats offer a great op- portunity to adapt the contents of Web documents to differ- ent users' contexts.