Utilisation of User and Device Profiles for Adaptive WWW Access

The rapidly expanding mobile computing technology, the facility of access to information in the World Wide Web, and the recent developments in multimedia data handling are key issues towards a Global Information Infrastructure accessible for anyone, anywhere and anytime. In order to realise such an accessible infrastructure that will also be accepted and applied, one should especially consider the specific aspects of a mobile environment. Due to the inherent limitations of a mobile environment, one interesting challenge is the seamless integration of mobile devices within the existing WWW-infrastructure, enabling a mobile user to browse the Web. Adaption is one of the key concepts to support such an integration. In this paper we present a concept that adapts WWW browsing to the limits of the current resource environment. The main approach is to use information about the user preferences, the resource environments, and the data to be accessed. The information is evaluated within media s pecific rules to find a good trade between the limitations. This paper focuses on the handling and representation of rules and metainformation within the adaption proxy and the Resource Information Base (RIB). We describe the overall system concept, the architecture, and the main components.