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Kwang Bok Lee Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Roger A. Grice Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY

ACM Special Interest Group for Design of Communications archive
Proceedings of the 21st annual international conference on Documentation table of contents
San Francisco, CA, USA
PANEL SESSION: Getting and giving information table of contents
Pages: 125 - 132
Year of Publication: 2003
ISBN:1-58113-696-X

Abstract:
With the proliferation of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), people are using such small devices to access the web; however, the web is not accommodating such access. Here, for small devices' users, we present an efficient method for extracting readable documents from XML-based files, which will be used for information streams for mobile Internet access. We designed a selector for handling information streams to extract the customized information based on the user request for the small screen devices. The selector's attributes can be adapted from an XML document, and then used for translating information streams into the new file that will be displayed on the devices. Also, the selector has visual menu interfaces so that users can easily choose each attribute according to their preferences. This is developed to devise an efficient method for the small screen computers' problems. Furthermore, we prepared usability testing for the application in order to find usability problems, and then we offer further progress to improve the usability of working on devices. The prototype and implementation of this approach will be also provided in this paper.

My Discussion:
Technical paper demonstrating a system to hide or disclose more or less of an XML based document on a PDA. The user can manipulate the viewer on the PDA to select what level of elements to see, with choices like 'headlines on;y' or 'pictures as icons'. Sometimes a paper tries so hard to be clear about every step of a technological solution that the exposition ends up actually being a more confusing. This paper does not make clear why the XML needs to be loaded off a PC instead of being retreived directly over the internet by the PDA, and what transformation the PC is doing to the XML before the selector program in the PDA can handle the document. Seeing also that the corpus of (badly formatted) XML-related documents out there -- the WWW of which most is in HTML -- is never mentioned, the paper seems oddly abstract and ungrounded.