Personalization terms

The concepts and principles for working with Portal Personalization require an understanding of terminology.

1. Resources, resource instances, and resource collections
   Before we can personalize IBM WebSphere Portal resources, you need to understanding the terms for portal objects stored in the content repository.

2. User resources
   Your Web site visitors want to quickly access the Web content that meets their needs and interests. The needs and interests of the site visitors are stored as properties in the user profile data store.

3. Content resources
   Web content resources consist of data that is formatted and displayed on Web pages. Examples include news articles, products, statistics and educational materials.

4. Attribute Based Administration
   Attribute based administration provides a facility to customize the layout of a page for individual authenticated users using rules to show or hide pages or portlets. This implementation tells the portal to show or hide pages and portlets based on dynamic characteristics that are determined at runtime. Attribute Based Administration is only available for authenticated users. For anonymous users, all pages are shown.

5. Rules
   Rules are used to define how the Web site interacts with individual and groups of Web site visitors. Rules are composed of easy-to-read logic statements that, in their final form, specify how to evaluate various conditions and what actions to take based on those conditions.

6. Content spots
   A content spot is a placeholder or slot for a rule on a Web page. When the page is viewed, the content spot uses its rule mapping to determine which rule to execute. When the rule is executed, any actions defined within the rule take place. Each content spot has a unique name. A content spot's content type must be defined when it is created and should not be changed.

7. Rule spot mappings
   For a rule to be used on the Web site, it must be mapped to an existing content spot. A rule spot mapping is merely an association between a content spot and a rule. Changing the rule that is executed in the run-time environment is as easy as mapping a different rule to a content spot.

8. Campaigns
   Campaigns are a means of organizing and implementing sets of personalization behavior. A useful analogy is an advertising campaign, which targets specific audiences with high-priority information for a specified period of time. Campaigns achieve this by allowing you to preferentially display campaign-related content in the content spots of a Web site. To accomplish such a goal, a campaign contains has a set of rule-to-content spot mappings, start dates, and stop dates.

9. Application object
   An application object is a java object existing at a known location in the request context. Defining an application object involves specifying the object’s class name (as a Java class), and specifying a key (string key into a session attribute) to find it in the request context. Personalization calls methods on these objects during rule execution and uses their results in its decision making. Application Objects that implement the SelfInitializingApplicationObject interface are automatically instantiated as needed by Personalization.

10. Request Context
    This is the interface used to access various attributes for rules. For HTTP contexts, it provides access to the HttpRequest and HttpSession attributes. For non-HTTP contexts, it provides the same interface to a surrogate for the request and session.

11. Query framework
    The query framework is an object representation of a query. The framework is not specifically oriented toward querying either object or relational databases. A set of common operators is defined, but what an attribute represents is determined by the interpreter of the query.

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