Resource adaptive WWW access for mobile applications

Mobile Computing and World Wide Web are rapidly gaining popularity. They are fundamental technologies for a vision of information access for anyone, anytime, anywhere. However, mobile information access has to cope with the heterogeneity, dynamic and restrictions (e.g., narrow bandwidth, restricted resources) of the mobile environment. In this paper we present a system that supports a useful integration of portable computing devices such as (Sub-)Notebook, Palmtop or Personal Digital Assistants within the present WWW infrastructure. We propose an architecture for a context-aware adaptation within a mobile WWW environment. It enables resource adaptive access to any content within the WWW. The main idea is to exploit meta-information about the resource environment and user preferences to find a suitable adaptation pipeline to overcome most limitations of mobile information access. We discuss our first experiences we made with AdaWeb prototype. Then we present the extensions of our adaptation system to improve the mobile WWW access. (C) 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.