Point-of-view: Custom information delivery via hand-held devices

Socially, hand-held devices are becoming ubiquitous; technologically, they are already in a position to mediate access to on-line news. We argue that current frameworks for news delivery to hand-helds, typically involving transcoding methods by remote proxies layered over generic summarisation techniques are not well suited to the task. This work addresses two questions in this context: the specialised 'transcoding' strategy for a well-defined subtype of content, namely that of primarily text-based news documents, and the emergence of a 'summary-for-a-hand-held genre, which exploits advanced linguistic analysis to meet the particular requirements of news skimming on hand-helds. Directly related is the issue of how novel methods for deriving context- and profile-sensitive document abstractions interact with novel metaphors for mediating these abstractions on the basis of who, where, and when is using them.