Efficient Information Access from Constraint Wireless Terminals: Exploiting Personalization and Location-Based Services

Today, the success of data services used from small mobile devices, like digital phones or PDAs, appears very limited. Different reasons can be identified, which prevent the average customer from broadly using wireless data services. At first, the user has to deal with very uncomfortable devices in terms of UI ergonomy, and on the other hand, the costs for wireless data communication are extremely high. These restrictions can be overcome by employing a system concept, which is built up on two main components: A personalized display software allows simplifying the information access on the wireless terminal, while an intermediate agent residing on the Internet takes care of mining the desired contents from the open Web. In addition to the improved UI handling, this concept offers a reduction of access costs and an increase in retrieval speed. Real-world experiments with an information system on actual train departures are reported for measuring and demonstrating the benefit of the described system concept.