Webviews: Accessing Personalized Web Content and Services
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WebViews: Accessing Personalized Web Content and Services Juliana Freire Bharat Kumar Daniel Lieuwen [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] eb from a PDAsuch ABSTRACT Consider for example accessing the W as the Palm Pilot, using a wireless data service such as Om- The abilitytotake information, entertainment and e-com- 1 nisky [20]. Omnisky runs over CDPD and has e ective merce on the go has great promise. However, the existing throughput rates that vary from 5-6 kbps up to 12-13 kbps. Web infrastructure and contentwere designed for desktop Combining that with a screen size of 160x160 pixels on a computers and are not well-suited for other typ es of accesses, 6x6cm surface, it can b e very hard to browse through large e.g., devices that have less pro cessing power and memory, pages with rich graphics. Given that these devices have sig- small screens, and limited input facilities, or through wire- ni cantly less memory and pro cessing p ower than desktops, less data networks with low bandwidth and high latency. the available browsers only have a small subset of the fea- Thus, there is a growing need for techniques that provide tures of the widely used browsers (e.g., they do not supp ort alternative means to access Web content and services, b e it Java, Javascript, and are not able to display GIF or JPEG the ability to browse the Web through a wireless PDAor images). In addition, input facilities are limited|even with smart phone, or hands-free access through voice interfaces. Palm's Gra tti text input system, entering text can b e very In this pap er, we discuss issues involved in making existing time consuming. Similar diculties arise while trying to Web content and services available for diverse environments, access the Web using WAP phones (Internet-ready mobile and describ e WebViews, a system that allows casual Web phones). Newer additions to the PDA family, such as the users to easily create customized views of Web sites that are Compaq iPAQ, have more memory,powerful pro cessors, and well-suited for di erenttyp es of terminals. In particular, we could eventually have more complete browser supp ort; how- describ e our approachtoprovide voice access to these Web ever, the screen size, limited input capabilities, and high views and exp eriences in building the system. latency for page accesses still apply. oice interfaces have received much attention recently as Keywords V an e ective means of user interaction which b oth simpli es the input pro cess, and provides more convenient (hands- content transco ding, dynamic content, electronic commerce, free) access. The advances in voice recognition and text-to- information delivery, p ersonalization, smart b o okmarks, voice sp eech (TTS), combined with the steady increase in com- interfaces, Web clipping, wrapp ers puting power has made these technologies viable for end- Standards suchasVoice eXtensible Markup Language 1. INTRODUCTION users. (VoiceXML) have been prop osed for making Web content The explosion in the use and availability of wireless de- and information accessible via voice and phone. But even vices and the ability they give p eople to access information though there are some VoiceXML-based services available, anytime and anywhere has great promise. In the U.S. alone, most contentontheWeb consists of HTML pages and can- Dataquest exp ects that the number of wireless data sub- not b e easily accessed through voice interfaces. scrib ers will explo de from 3 million in 1999 to 36 million in The reality is that the Web is not really accessible anytime 2003. Thus, very so on, millions of p eople will be able to or anywhere. Di erent attempts have b een made to address access the Web, and order services and go o ds from wireless these shortcomings: Internet devices. However, the existing Web infrastructure and contentwere designed for desktop computers and are Re-engineering existing Web sites and services: content not well-suited for devices that have less pro cessing p ower providers create di erent versions of their Web sites that and memory, small screens, limited input capabilities, and provide content formatted for sp eci c devices. For example: that are connected through networks that have high laten- The New York Times has a palm-friend ly section [18]; Ama- cies and low bandwidth. zon provides a sp ecialized interface for Web-enabled phones, as well as for the Palm VI I [3]; and various other Web sites nowhave mobile phone-friendly versions (see [26] for a list such sites). Creating specialized wrappers that export a di erent view of a Web page or service: services such as everypath.com Copyright is held by the author/owner. 1 [7] is a wireless IP network that overlays on the WWW10, May 1-5, 2001, Hong Kong. CDPD ACM 1-58113-348-0/01/0005. existing AMPS (analog) cellular infrastructure. 576 Internet through a cable mo dem the transfer would take and oraclemobile.com provide to ols and services to create less than 5 seconds. wrapp ers which can exp ort wireless-friendly clippings of a In general, it would b e useful if one could easily create not set of Web pages and services, such as sto ck quotes, trac, only simple shortcuts, but di erent views of Web sites that and weather information. Similar voice-enabled services are are b etter suited to b e accessed from di erent terminals. For provided by tellme.com and heyanita.com. wireless devices and voice interfaces, it would b e useful to Using proxies that lter and reformat Web content: prox- reduce the numb er of required interactions, and the amount ies can b e programmed to transform content according to of data input and transferred. For example, one could cre- client's display size and capabilities. For example, Prox- ate a clipping template for searching for ights from Trav- iWeb [23] transforms HTML pages and emb edded gures elo city that would automatically login and navigate to the into a format that can b e displayed on a Palm Pilot. Phone- page where Juliana enters the details of her itinerary (with Browser [22] similarly transforms HTML pages into a form Newark automatically lled in as the departure airp ort by that can b e read using TTS over the phone. the system). 2 All these approaches have drawbacks. From a contentpro- Our Contributions: We prop ose the WebViews architec- vider's p ersp ective, creating and maintaining multiple ver- ture as a solution for creating customized views of Web con- sions of a Web site to supp ort di erent devices is lab or in- tent and services. The main idea is to let end-users easily tensive and can b e very exp ensive. Even though wrapp ers create and maintain simpli ed views of Web content and require no mo di cations to the underlying Web sites, they services, from CNN health headlines to bank balances. By can b e costly to create and need up dating whenever the cor- allowing users to create their own Web views, a service can resp onding Web site or service changes. From a user's p oint be o ered that is personalized and not restricted to a set of view, b oth solutions are restrictive, as neither do all Web of supp orted Web sites, in contrast with services such as sites supp ort all kinds of devices, nor do existing wrapp er- tellme.com that only allows access to a pre-sp eci ed menuof based solutions o er clippings for all content and services a p opular choices. Users can easily customize suchWeb views user may need. for sp eci c devices. In addition, since these Web views pro- Proxy transco ders, on the other hand, p erform on-the- y vide a simpler view of sites and services, they are consider- content translation and, in theory, they are a go o d general ably simpler to transco de into other languages (or formats). solution for allowing users to browse anyWeb site. But since Anumb er of requirements exist for a system that creates Web pages must b e presented as faithfully as p ossible, these Web views. First, since it is targeted to end-users, it must general purp ose proxies do not p erform any p ersonalization. b e easy to use and require no programming exp ertise. An- This is clearly not the ideal solution for someb o dy accessing other imp ortant requirementisthatWeb views should b e ro- the Web through a cellular phone with a 3-line display,or bust. Since Web sites maychange often, Web views should through a voice interface. Besides, some features are hard or degrade gracefully with these changes, i.e., if changes are even imp ossible to translate. It is not unusual that proxies minor, the Web views should still return the desired con- fail to prop erly transco de complex pages, or even simple, tent. In the event of radical changes, they should b e easy to but badly designed pages (Section 4.1 discusses this issue). up date. Example 1.1. [A Web view: Pricing airfare] Consider In this pap er we describ e howWebViews ful lls these re- the following scenario. Juliana plans to attend the WWW10 quirements, and discuss how it can b e used for information conference and she is lo oking for ights from Newark Air- delivery to diverse devices. We also describ e the implemen- p ort to Hong Kong that leave from Newark on April 29th tation of (and our exp eriences with) VoiceViews, a system and return from Hong Kong on May 6th.