Multi-resolution information transmission in mobile environments

Mobile environments are characterized by low communication bandwidth and frequent disconnection. Conventional information retrieval and visualization mechanisms thus pose a serious challenge to mobile clients. There is a need for these clients to quickly perceive an overall picture of the information available to them, so as to enable them to discontinue the transmission of information units that are unlikely useful to them. We had proposed a multi-resolution transmission mechanism for web documents. In particular, various organizational units of a document are transmitted to a mobile client in an order according to their information content, thereby allowing the client to terminate the transmission of a useless document at an earlier moment. In this paper, we generalize the multi-resolution transmission model for a document, and then extend that model into the multi-resolution transmission framework to cater for not only units within a document, but also for a collection of documents. We refer to the multi-resolution transmission mechanism for a particular document as intra-document multi-resolution transmission mechanism and the extension to a document cluster as inter-document multi-resolution transmission mechanism. With the integrated multi-resolution transmission framework, a mobile client can examine the important portions of the document cluster for an early grasp of the information therein, with the most important contents for each of those documents more readily available as well.