An interchange format for cross-media personalized publishing

Web sites are rapidly becoming the medium of choice for one-to-one marketing, communication and commerce. Many commercial solutions in this area have the following drawbacks: they force companies to implement systems within a single framework that is highly vendor-specific and that does not allow them to reuse content for other media. In this paper, we introduce i*Doc, a simple XML interchange format for content-level conditionalization based on a variant of the MIL-PRF-87269 standard for classes TV-V IETMs. This format can serve as integration format in multi-vendor CRM solutions and offers consistent cross-media publishing to multiple lower-level delivery channels such as direct mail, ASP, JSP, and WML. Personalization is determined by properties that can be bound to intelligent external systems and determined dynamically. As a showcase for i*Doc, we have developed a demonstrator of an on-line wine shop, where i*Doc serves to transport information between a database of product descriptions and generated ASP pages. The Web site is highly dynamic, as its behavior is controlled by properties that are re-computed using predictive models generated by the OMEGA predictive data mining (PDM) system. The use of i*Doc allows content to be rapidly retargeted towards other Web delivery platforms, such as JSP, direct mail or mobile Internet. (C) 2000 Published by Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.