Assisted Human-in-the-Loop Adaptation of Web Pages for Mobile Devices

Companies seeking to make their web sites usable for viewing by mobile devices currently need to create a parallel set of web pages designed and built specifically for browsing by devices with screen size and computing constraints. Most companies, however, do not have IT resources to spare for this essentially duplicate manual effort. Hence, effective techniques that can ease the burden of developing mobile web pages can be of great value. In this paper, we present the architecture, design and implementation of a ´web site mobilizer´ for semi-automatically converting existing web pages to pages suitable for mobile viewing. The mobilizer extracts the component hierarchy of the page using web crawler techniques, analyzes the structure of the web page, and then converts it to the mobile version using a combination of techniques that include link analysis, ranking algorithms based on component content, and interactive removal of irrelevant content. This mobilizer is in limited production use.