Andreas Girgensohn

Web Page Filtering and Re-Authoring for Mobile Users

The Digestor system automatically converts web-based documents designed for desktop viewinginto formats appropriate for handheld devices with small display screens, such as Palm-PCs, PDAs,and cellular phones. Digestor employs a heuristic planning algorithm and a set of structural pagetransformations to produce the ‘best’ looking document for a given display size. Digestor can also beinstructed, via a scripting language, to render portions of documents, thereby avoiding navigationthrough many screens of information. Two versions of Digestor have been deployed, one that re-authors HTML into HTML for conventional browsers and one that converts HTML into HDML forPhone.com’s micro-browsers. Digestor provides a crucial technology for rapidly accessing, scanningand processing information from arbitrary web-based documents from any location reachable bywired or unwired communication.