Using Metadata to Support Customization

The ability for knowledge workers to customize their information space, to personalize the information items with which they work, is an important capability, one that is valuable in the performance of complex tasks. Ideally all of the information systems with which users interact would support the capability to personalize information by allowing the individualized customization of the data objects they contain. However, this is a difficult capability to provide and is not supported by most current systems. This is especially true for networked based information systems with a large number of distributed users, a type of system that represents an increasingly important part of the information needs of knowledge workers. The research described in this paper addresses the information customization issue. A metadatabased architecture for supporting the customization of data objects is presented along with usage scenarios describing how the functionality it provides can be utilized to support the customization and personalization process in existing systems.