Multi-resolution Web Document Browsing in a Distributed Agent Environment

Abstract

A mobile environment is characterized by low communication bandwidth and poor network connectivity. Accessing web documents in a mobile environment is ineffcient and ineffective. To address this, we have developed a multi-resolution transmission and browsing mechanism for web documents [3]. In this mechanism, a web document is modeled as a hierarchy of levels of detail (LOD), which include Document, Section, Subsection, Subsubsection, and Paragraph. An organizational unit at the Document LOD is composed of several organizational units at the Section LOD, each of which is in turn, composed of several organizational units at the Subsection LOD, and so on. Using information retrieval techniques, we associate each organizational unit with an information content, indicating the degree to which the unit captures the content of the document. A user could request a document to be transmitted at various LODs. When transmitted at the Document LOD, the whole web document is considered as a single unit and all its sections will be transmitted in sequence. When transmitted at the Section LOD, the section with the highest information content will be transmitted first, with its subsections transmitted in sequence. In general, all descendants of the chosen organizational unit will be transmitted in sequence. This multi-resolution transmission and browsing mechanism enables a mobile user to explore the more content-bearing portion and terminate the transmission of an irrelevant document earlier, providing a means to deal with the low bandwidth problem.

This research is supported in part by the Hong Kong Polytechnic University research grant numbers 350/922 and G-T040.