  Personalization customizes information access. The PIPE ("Personalization is
Partial Evaluation") modeling methodology represents interaction with an
information space as a program. The program is then specialized to a user's
known interests or information seeking activity by the technique of partial
evaluation. In this paper, we elaborate PIPE by considering requirements
analysis in the personalization lifecycle. We investigate the use of scenarios
as a means of identifying and analyzing personalization requirements. As our
first result, we show how designing a PIPE representation can be cast as a
search within a space of PIPE models, organized along a partial order. This
allows us to view the design of a personalization system, itself, as
specialized interpretation of an information space. We then exploit the
underlying equivalence of explanation-based generalization (EBG) and partial
evaluation to realize high-level goals and needs identified in scenarios; in
particular, we specialize (personalize) an information space based on the
explanation of a user scenario in that information space, just as EBG
specializes a theory based on the explanation of an example in that theory. In
this approach, personalization becomes the transformation of information spaces
to support the explanation of usage scenarios. An example application is
described.
