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Abstract. We describe the user modeling and personalization techniques adopted in SETA, a shell supporting the construction of adaptive Web stores which customize the interactions with users, suggesting the items best fitting their needs, and adapting the description of the store catalog to their preferences and expertise. SETA uses stereotypical information to handle the user models and applies personalization rules to dynamically generate the hypertextual pages presenting products: the system adapts the graphical aspect, length and terminology used in the descriptions to the user's receptivity, expertise and interests. Moreover, it maintains a profile associated to each person the goods are selected for, to provide multiple criteria for the selection of items, tailored to the beneficiaries' preferences.

The emerging standards for the specification of Web Services support the publication of the static interfaces of the operations they may execute. However, little attention is paid to the management of long-lasting interactions between the service providers and their consumers. Although this is not an issue in the case of "one-shot" services, it challenges the provision of services requiring the exchange of multiple messages between the business partners.In this paper, we present a conversation model supporting the management of longlasting interactions where several messages have to be exchanged before the service is completed. Our model aims at facilitating the consumers during the service invocation because in this way the establishment of short-term business relations can be simplified. To this extent, we provide a computational framework that can be exploited to manage a conversation between the consumer and the service provider. Our framework is inspired from the research developed in Computational Linguistics and in the area of Multi-Agent Systems to manage human-to-computer and agent-to-agent dialog. However, we employ techniques suitable to comply with the emerging Web Service standards and with the scalability requirements of the Internet.

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