Towards a unified device characteristics retrieval and propagation: Context proxy presentation

Pervasive computing had brought the “anytime / anywhere” paradigm for information consumption. Moreover, given the tremendous amount of information and services available on the Web among the evolution of the social Web, more and more display units are being brought to the market (latest being the tablets family: iPad, kindle, etc.). Nevertheless, the Web contents were not designed to be properly displayed on interactive IPTVs (high resolution but poor interactive element: no mouse/keyboard, but a remote controller). A solution has been brought with dynamic adaptation of web content. The main drawback of researches in this domain is the default assumption that the SetTop Box capabilities are already known prior to the adaptation. In this paper, we propose an architecture not only to retrieve the display unit characteristics, but also a mean to propagate them in the browsing session. Consequently the Web content can be adapted by parts according to the device constraints, and each adaptation may depend on the previous adaptation (handling multi-part adaptation of Web pages for the interactive IPTV).