Fractal summarization for mobile devices to access large documents on the web

Abstract

Wireless access with mobile (or handheld) devices is a promising addition to the WWW and traditional electronic business. Mobile devices provide convenience and portable access to the huge information space on the Internet without requiring users to be stationary with network connection. However, the limited screen size, narrow network bandwidth, small memory capacity and low computing power are the shortcomings of handheld devices. Loading and visualizing large documents on handheld devices become impossible. The limited resolution restricts the amount of information to be displayed. The download time is intolerably long. In this paper, we introduce the fractal summarization model for document summarization on handheld devices. Fractal summarization is developed based on the fractal theory. It generates a brief skeleton of summary at the first stage, and the details of the summary on different levels of the document are generated on demands of users. Such interactive summarization reduces the computation load in comparing with the generation of the entire summary in one batch by the traditional automatic summarization, which is ideal for wireless access. Three-tier architecture with the middle-tier conducting the major computation is also discussed. Visualization of summary on handheld devices is also investigated.