Ubiquitous Web Access Using A Telephone Set and A Fax Machine

• Main Authors: Ming-Yuhe Jang, 張明裕
• Other Authors: Chung-Ming Huang
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1999
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/98561317563916609564

博士 === 國立成功大學 === 資訊工程研究所 === 87 === Ubiquitous Web Access Using A Telephone Set and A Fax Machine By Ming-Yuhe Jang National Cheng Kung University, 1999 Chung-Ming Huang, Advisor The goal of this dissertation is to achieve ubiquitous web access using a telephone set and a fax machine. Using a telephone set and a fax machine, a user can access WWW information and services over Internet. In other words, by selecting instructions or entering inquiry data by pressing keystrokes (i.e., digit ‘0’ to ‘9’ and digit ‘#’) on a phone keypad, the user could “listen to” and “watch” the requested WWW information. Besides this, the user can even then have the WWW transaction services, e.g., foreign dollars exchange, transfer accounts (in banking), stock buying/selling (in stock trading), outpatient registration (in hospital), etc. Currently, WWW is a distributed multimedia system with the server-client architecture. WWW clients and WWW servers are interconnected with Internet. HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is the underlying transfer mechanism of WWW, which carries multimedia information between clients and servers. Initially, a client retrieves Web pages that are in HyperText Markup Language (HTML) from a server. Parsing the retrieved HTML Web pages, a regular browser, e.g., Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator, will further fetch the linked media objects, e.g., audio, image, graphics, and video, and render the parsed result at the client site. WWW provides users with media information specified in HTML. There are some characteristics of HTML-based WWW system, (1) the main input devices, which provide access interfaces to Web pages stored at servers, are keyboard and mouse; (2) the main output devices, which present the linked media objects, are monitor and speaker. Such a restricted way for accessing WWW blocks some people to enjoy the happiness of using WWW. For example, (1) Some people dislike or are not capable enough to use computers, e.g., the generation of our grandmother/grandfather or even mother/father. (2) When people are in some places, in which there is no computer, but they do need to access WWW because of some matters. (3) Some people cannot see anything, i.e., blind people. Blind people cannot read the information that is displayed on the monitor because they can only hear something but cannot see anything. Some people cannot access keyboard and mouse, i.e., the handicap people. These people will be out-of-date if no alternative access devices can be provided for them to access WWW. Therefore, some convenient I/O (e.g., Ubiquitous Web Access in this dissertation) facilities are desired to be setup such that WWW is accessible more easily no matter what users are and no matter where users are. A nice choice is the telephone-based I/O device, e.g., a telephone set and a fax machine, which are generally adopted in the worldwide communication. To achieve the purpose of Ubiquitous Web Access, the concept of Quality-of-Information (QOI) is proposed. The QOI concept is in the sense that the same piece of information is delivered to the client users with different qualities depending on the client I/O devices, e.g., computers, telephones, or fax machines. Different users with different I/O devices receive different quality of information for the same piece of information. Based on the QOI concept, this dissertation presents the design and implementation of Hyper Phone Markup Language (HPML) —based Web systems, i.e., Phone-Web, FaxWeb, and TEC-Web systems. By using these three HPML-based systems, users can access WWW using a telephone set and a fax machine. In this way, the user spectrum of WWW and the WWW service range can be enlarged. Both WWW users and Internet service providers can benefit from the WWW enlargement.