Applying Semantic Segment Detection to Enhance Web Page Presentation on the Mobile Internet

To facilitate wide adoption of handheld devices for mobile Internet access, it is important to enable the “develop once and use everywhere” concept. This means that a Web page can be developed in HTML for presentation on desktop machines, and then be automatically adapted and displayed on any devices including handheld devices. In this paper, we present a mediator Web service that automatically adapts a Web page into suitable formats based on receiving devices. Our underpinning is a hierarchical semantic meta model associated with a semantic ontology. They guide in partitioning a Web page into semantically coherent segments, which refer to atomic units encapsulating semantically coherent elements in a Web page. Our experimental results demonstrate that our semantic segment detection algorithm helps in transforming Web pages into semantic-retained formats suitable to be displayed on handheld devices.