Towards Cross Site Personalisation

Personalisation on the web is mostly confined to websites of online content providers. The main drawback of this approach is the missing consideration of the users previous cross-site browsing experience resulting in an often fragmented browsing experience. This paper introduces a service driven architecture for user-centric personalisation in online cross-site tasks. The goal of the architecture is twofold: (1) to provide non-intrusive personalised recommendations to the user by not interfering in their browsing freedom and (2) to introduce cross-site personalisation in a non-invasive manner, thus not interfering with the design and functionality of the overall website. We introduce the proposed architecture and its applicability across separately hosted open-source Web-based Content Management Systems (WCMS). We also discuss encouraging results of an initial task-based experiment concentrating on the user´s perception of non-intrusive personalisation within and across different websites.