Edwin P.D. Pednault Communications of the ACM Vol.
Representation is everything.
It permeates all aspects of personalization. The extent to which a personalized interactive service or product can adapt to individual users depends on the information captured by the system and how that information is utilized. From the human perspective, representation ultimately affects presentation and interaction with a service or product. Media and interactive form can be as important as content because individuals process sensory stimuli in their own unique ways, and each individual has his or her own preferred sensory mode, which may change depending on context. Text might be the predominant means of supplying information over the Web today, but it is not always the preferred medium from the point of view of the recipient.