Abstract

The conventional news media like News Paper, TV, Radio, and internet provide news in bulk, of which only a certain limited topics may be of interest to an individual. Each of these media has some limitations in delivering the news in a personalized form. TV and Radio do not provide any control to the user in selecting a particular news, while the News Paper is not dynamic like TV or Radio. Internet has dynamism, good user control, and interactivity, but the available Internet browsers are not very user friendly in personalizing the news. To overcome these limitations, an Electronic News Delivery System (ENDS), which delivers multimedia news documents that are personalized for each customer, is proposed here. The ENDS spreads over one Client and many Servers. The Client interacts with the user and collects the requirements while the Server stores the news documents. The system provides both Conventional News Delivery and Personalized News Delivery services. To find a good language for communicating between User, Client, and Servers, a number of requirements were identified for the ENDS. Several existing query languages were studied to see whether any of them met these requirements, but none of them was found to be totally suitable for personalized news delivery. Therefore, a new domain specific language called the User Interaction Language (UIL) was developed in this work. A Graphical User Interface for the ENDS was also designed and implemented to collect the user requirements and to convert them to appropriate UIL query.