MPhil Thesis Defence


"Slicing*-Tree Based Web Page Transformation for Small Displays"

By

Miss Xiangye Xiao


Abstract

We propose a new Web page transformation method to facilitate Web browsing
on handheld devices such as Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs). These
devices have limited capabilities, in particular, small display and low
bandwidth.

In our approach, an original Web page that does not fit into the screen is
transformed into a set of pages, each of which fits into the screen. This
transformation is done through slicing the original page into page blocks
iteratively with several factors considered, including the size of the
screen, the size of each page block, the number of blocks in each
transformed page, the depth of the tree hierarchy that the transformed
pages form, as well as the semantic coherence between blocks. We call the
tree hierarchy of the transformed pages a slicing*-tree, in which an
internal node consists of a textually-enhanced thumbnail image with
hyperlinks and a leaf node is a block from the original Web page. The
textually-enhanced thumbnails take advantage of both graphical and textual
summaries and provide better overviews of transformed pages. Moreover, we
adaptively adjust the degree of a node and the height of the slicing*-tree
so that each thumbnail image is clear enough for users to read while the
number of clicks needed to reach a leaf page only a few. Through this
transformation, we preserve the contextual information in the original Web
page and save the effort on page scrolling.

We have implemented this transformation system in a proxy server. On a
page request, the proxy fetches the original Web page as well as embedded
images, dynamically transforms the Web page for small displays, and
delivers the transformed pages to users progressively. We discuss the
architecture, the transformation algorithm, and the empirical studies on
our system. The experimental results show that our approach improves Web
browsing on small displays in terms of task completion time, input effort,
and network bandwidth consumption.


Date:				Tuesday, 16 August 2005

Time:				3:00p.m.-5:00p.m.

Venue:				Room 2464
				Lifts 25-26

Committee Members:		Dr. Qiong Luo (Supervisor)
                     		Prof. Dik Lun Lee (Chairperson)
                        	Dr. Shing Chi Cheung


**** ALL are Welcome ****