Mobile information access in the real world: A story of three wireless devices

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2008 ElsevierThe importance of the user perspective to the wireless information access experience cannot be understated: simply put, users will not indulge in devices that are perceived to be difficult to use and in technologies that do not offer quality infotainment – combined information and entertainment – content. In this paper, we investigate the impact that mobile devices have on the user wireless infotainment access experience in practice. To this end, we have undertaken an empirical study placed in a ‘real-world’ setting, in which participants undertook typical infotainment access tasks on three different wireless-enabled mobile devices: a laptop, a personal digital assistant and a head mounted display device. Results show that, with the exception of participants’ level of self-consciousness when using such devices in public environments, the user wireless information access experience is generally unaffected by device type. Location was shown, though, to be a significant factor when users engage in tasks such as listening to online music or navigation. Whilst the interaction between device and environment was found to influence entertainment-related tasks in our experiments, the informational ones were not affected. However, the interaction effects between device and user type was found to affect both types of tasks. Lastly, a user’s particular computing experience was shown to influence the perceived ease of wireless information access only in the case of online searching, irrespective of whether this is done for primarily informational purposes or entertainment ones

Pervasive and standalone computing: The perceptual effects of variable multimedia quality.

The introduction of multimedia on pervasive and mobile communication devices raises a number of perceptual quality issues, however, limited work has been done examining the 3-way interaction between use of equipment, quality of perception and quality of service. Our work measures levels of informational transfer (objective) and user satisfaction (subjective)when users are presented with multimedia video clips at three different frame rates, using four different display devices, simulating variation in participant mobility. Our results will show that variation in frame-rate does not impact a user’s level of information assimilation, however, does impact a users’ perception of multimedia video ‘quality’. Additionally, increased visual immersion can be used to increase transfer of video information, but can negatively affect the users’ perception of ‘quality’. Finally, we illustrate the significant affect of clip-content on the transfer of video, audio and textual information, placing into doubt the use of purely objective quality definitions when considering multimedia presentations

Designing Ubiquitous Personalized TV-Anytime Services

In this paper we present the design of an environment that offers personalized, ubiquitous information services in the emerging integrated world of the digital-TV and the Internet. This environment is based on extended TV sets with a large capacity disk and Internet connection. We present an architecture that integrates external service providers that provide extended information services about broadcasts with powerful retrieval, personalization and ubiquitous access capabilities. We assume that the metadata information about the content of the TV programs follows the TV-anytime Forum Metadata (TVAM) specifications. The architecture allows content based matching and/or retrieval based on the description of the broadcast or parts of the broadcast according to the interests of the viewers. The viewer has access to his/her "personal channel" any time not only from home, but also while on move. It is obvious that due to communication, storage and processing limitations of handy devices, it is not possible to access normal digital-TV content. Thus, special mechanisms that filter and appropriately adapt the content are necessary, in order to meet user's preferences and make its delivery and presentation feasible on the handy devices

Querying MOF repositories: The design and Implementation of the query metamodel language (QML)

Summarization: In a Digital Business Ecosystem (DBE) information on the businesses and the services they provide may be described in terms of models and data which are used to semantically discover partners and services. The Object Management Group (OMG) defines a four layered modelling architecture, the Model Driven Architecture (MDA), which provides mechanisms for rapid development of modelling languages addressing domain problems using the Meta Object Facility (MOF). MOF incorporates object oriented concepts and is a subset of UML. Furthermore, as users typically don’t know how to make requests, the system has to be tolerant. The Query Metamodel Language (QML) is a language that ex-ploits the Object Constraint Language (OCL) (which is very closely associated with UML and therefore MOF) to provide powerful query support on model repositories. This paper presents the motivation for QML along with its abstract syn-tax. It also introduces the framework for QML processing that incorporates information retrieval functionality and is used to formulate fuzzy queries using the extended boolean model. It describes how QML is integrated in the MOF architecture and how semantic expansion of queries and evaluation can be done in an effective way.Presented on

A natural language model for managing TV-anytime information in mobile environments

Summarization: The TV-Anytime standard describes structures of categories of digi-tal TV program metadata, as well as User Profile metadata for TV programs. We describe a natural language model for the users to interact with the TV-Anytime metadata and preview TV programs from their mobile devices. The language utilizes completely the TV-Anytime metadata specifications and it can accommodate future metadata extensions. The interaction model does not use clarification dialogues, but it uses the user profiles to rank the possible answers in case of ambiguities, as well as TV-Anytime Metadata information and on-tologies with information concerning digital TV. We describe an implementa-tion of the language that runs on a PDA and a mobile phone and manages the metadata on a remote TV-Anytime compatible TV set.Presented on: Personal and Ubiquitous Computin