Challenges for the multi-lingual, multi-dimensional personalised web

The explosive growth of the Internet has seen it exceed over two billion users in 2010. However an analysis of the demography of this user base indicates an ever growing diversity. Currently only 38.8% of internet users originate from the countries such as Europe, America and Australia whereas 61.2% internet users come from the Africa, Asia and Middle East. Moreover, these figures are changing even farther in favour of Africa, Asia and Middle East countries since their current internet penetration levels are relatively low e.g. the penetration of the internet in China/Asia is only at 21%, and Africa is only 10%. It is clear that the diversity of the user base of the web is growing rapidly. Moreover research is showing that each individual uses the WWW in different ways that suit their own personal needs, preferences. However, it is also clear that these differences extends far beyond just the appropriateness of content selection, and encompasses many dimensions e.g. tasks & activities, cultural preferences, language and social interaction etc. From a language diversity perspective, this growing diversity of internet users is increasingly apparent with English only accounting for 27% of all languages on the Internet in 2010. Other evidence of user diversity is demonstrated in social networking sites such as Facebook where in 2007 it supported 50M users in only one language (English) whilst by 2010 it had grown to 600M users and supported 77 different languages. By 2010 55% (approximately 13.75 Billion) tweets on Twitter were non-English. The expansion of the internet is not just in user number but has also resulted in vast quantities and great diversity of WWW accessible content where user generated content has for some time exceeded traditional web hosted content. In 2011, mobile access to the Internet and WWW has exceeded that accessed from desktop computers. Increasingly digital content on the internet is reaching users, not just through traditional web queries but via collaborative social networks and mediated personalisation filters, which check for affinity, freshness and other complex selection factors. Adaptive Hypermedia and Adaptive Web research is examining the personalised delivery and exploration of adaptive content. However, content personalisation has traditionally been focused on closed-corpus content, with less research being conducted on open corpus content. From a commercial perspective, information portals and recommender systems have been more focused on adaptive content identification/retrieval rather than adaptive content composition. It is well recognised that a key influencer on the WWW's evolution will be the end-users themselves and not just the major commercial internet players and technical communities. In fact social networking/social media is the fastest growing sector of the WWW and is facilitating the rapid formation of communities of extremely diverse users. The evolving WWW must be able to break the barriers of language, it must empower users to easily assimilate and reuse content, and it must connect users with real, shared interests in an even more meaningful way.