Member Submission - Note

Date: Feb. 9, 1999
Link: http://www.w3.org/TR/NOTE-PIDL
Source Author or Organization: NEC

Excerpted from "Introduction": "As the amount of available information on the World Wide Web (WWW) continues to increases rapidly, more and more sites are beginning to provide personalization services to their users in order to ease the burden of finding useful information."

"In almost all current personalization applications, a central site (service) first collects some form of personal data relevant to the personalization (i.e. gender, age, interests, etc), obtains the raw data that should be personalized (i.e. newsfeed, product information, etc), personalizes it according to the user's preferences and finally makes it available to the user via download (using HTTP or FTP) or delivery (via email, Web push, etc). As personalization applications continue to grow on the Web, the above issues (user data solicitation, personalization of raw data, dissemination of personalized data) have become increasingly important for the Web community. In order to personalize both safe and effectively, we have to move away from ad-hoc implementations and create general frameworks that provide efficiency and interoperability."

"User's privacy has been a dominant topic in recent months and efforts such as the W3C's Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) [P3P] provide an architecture to solicitate, transmit and store user data in an informed and secure way. However, even after the industry wide acceptance of P3P or similar framworks, the actual personalization and dissemination of personalized data still remain isolated solutions that vary from service to service and application to application."

"The Personalized Information Description Language (PIDL) described in this document aims at creating a unified framework for services to both personalize and disseminate information. Using PIDL, services can describe the content and personalization methods used for customizing the information and use a single format for all available access methods."