When a person visits your Web site, the ATG platform automatically creates a profile for him or her and stores it in a profile repository set up by the application developers working on your Web site. The profile contains properties that describe the person’s characteristics. There are two kinds of profile properties: explicit and implicit. Site visitors provide explicit properties themselves, for example when they fill out a registration form to become a member of your site. Examples of explicit properties are a person’s name and address. Implicit properties, in contrast, represent information that the system gathers about visitors by tracking their behavior at your site. A list of recently browsed Web pages is an example of an implicit property.
Keeping track of profile properties makes it possible for a Web application to “remember” who users are from one visit to the next, and to deliver personalized content to them accordingly. For example, you could have an option on your registration form that asks visitors to indicate their income range; the system stores this information as a profile property. You could then set up your site content so that you display different items according to the income range of each site visitor.
Usually, the system updates profile properties automatically; you do not have to change them yourself. However, the ATG Control Center includes options that let you view the profiles in the repository. You can also use them to add, edit, and delete profiles if necessary.
