Information navigation profiles for mediation and adaptation

Information retrieval (IR) systems offer a variety of interfaces and interaction modes. A given IR system's interface and interaction mode may not be optimal for a given accessing device/network pair, or desired by a given user. In this paper we propose a set of attributes to characterize IR interfaces, interaction and presentation modes. We call a set of these bound attributes an information navigation profile (INP). We suggest the use of INPs in dynamic adaptation of IR interface, interaction and presentation modes by both origin and proxy servers.