The pragmatic web: addressing complex communication in public administration using tailored delivery

Public administrations must communicate with a diverse citizenry concerning complex programs and initiatives. Because producing individual communications for a large citizenry is expensive, the communications are written generically, carefully discussing all possible contingencies and details. Because the programs are complex, these generic communications are difficult to understand. One way to communicate more effectively in this complex environment is to automatically tailor each communication based on the context of each individual citizen. This paper presents a prototype system that produces web presentations describing the programs offered by a public administration agency to the citizenry it serves. The work is presented as an example of work on the pragmatic web. Particular attention is focused on the system's authoring tool, which allows authors to produce and configure the resources required to drive the tailoring mechanism.