Ming-Yuhe Chang and Jau-hao Zhang
Department of Information management
Southern Taiwan university of Technology
Correspondence: changmy@mail.stut.edu.tw
ABSTRACT
The remote control in many universal information appliances nowadays is operated through Mobile or Web Communications. For relaxing the access constraints in enjoying information appliance services, we established a web-based and unified personal web assistant ( UPWA ) to remotely control and access information appliance services. UPWA provides a unified access to the information appliance service control by integrating the access facilities used in wireless application protocol (WAP), public switched telephone network (PSTN), Mobile, and Web system platforms to save the system cost of maintenance.
Because of the access constraints released, users can use flexibly personal computers (PC), telephone sets, or WAP handheld devices to access information appliance services anytime anywhere they like.
1 、 INTRODUCTION
The Internet provides a convenient communication environment. Employing the
Internet, people started to communicate with each other by sending e-mail, chatting box, instead of writing letters. Lots of services are applied to improve human life, e.g., room and ticket reservations, e-ordering/transactions, e-learning, network banking, games, human care, information appliance, and entertainment. In addition to the
Internet services, personal communication systems on wireless network getting cheaper can offer the facilities for people to communicate with each other among geographically different places anytime and anywhere, and to enjoy personalized services.
By integrating the communication services and technologies across Internet, wireless network, and telephone network platforms as a whole into the proposed system ( a web-based and unified personal web assistant, UPWA ), we provide users the access control to information appliance services across the Internet, wireless network, and telephone networks connecting Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) phones,

Personal Computers (PC), telephone sets, and mobile phones. Employing UPWA, users can get the same services across the Internet, wireless network, and telephone network. In this way, UPWA can provide information appliance control service to all kinds of users in these three networks and just maintains one system rather than three systems to save the system maintenance cost.
In the rest of this paper, Section 2 addresses some related works, Section 3 depicts the proposed system architecture of UPWA, Section 4 describes the proposed system functions and work flows, and finally Section 5 concludes this work.
2 、 Related Work
In the recent years, plenty of technologies have appeared to deal with ‘Smart’
Homes and Offices, e.g., Berkeley Ninja Project [1], the Portolano project [2] from the University of Washington, Stanford’s Interactive Workspaces Project [3], and
Berkeley’s Document-based Framework for Internet Application Control [4].
The Stanford team [3] has developed some test boards that include large display devices as well as personal mobile computing devices, which are connected through a wireless LAN. They establish an infrastructure for users to do the same work using many devices with the ability to move works among different devices.
University of Washington’s Portolano project includes invisible computing, a term created by Donald Norman [5], to describe ubiquitous computing, where devices supporting distributed services blend into the user’s environment and become practically ‘invisible’. The user would invoke these services not just by input but also through augmenting forms of interfacing like user movement, proximity of devices, identification tags, etc.
Ninja Project[1] is a scalable Internet services architecture. It’s goal is to enable a menagerie of Internet-based services which are interoperable and immediately accessible across the spectrum of user devices ranging from PCs and workstations to cell phones and Personal Digital Assistants.
Centaurus [6] is able to support services on any platforms, they can communication with each other through Service Manger via socket connection. The clients, who request the services, can setup a client application to communicate with
Communication Management through socket connections and then request the

Service Management for some services.
Ninja just supplies a Web-based Service, but Centaurus is able to support
Services supply on any platform. Before connecting to Centaurus, it must to install some application enable the client to connect to Centaurus Communication. Unlike the Centaurus, UPWA clients don’t need a client application to access to the services.
UPWA Agent is just like an interpreter, it can determine on which service is connected to our system and gives the suitable interface to supply the services. Both the Centaurus and UPWA are aimed at supplying several communication platforms to get the services, UPWA is more convenience for those platforms connecting to the system and asking the wanted services.
The most important difference between our system and other system is the process, which clients connect to server for some services only have one communication channel
(internet). IF the Internet is broken, all systems will out of work. Instead of others, we have two communication channels (PSTN and Internet) to connect with our system. UPWA will still alive if one of channel is broken.
3 、 SYSTEM ARCHITECTURE
Unified Personal Web Assistant ( UPWA ) supplies information appliance control through three kinds of communication system, PC 、 WAP and telephony(include mobile phone and telephone). No matter what communication system you used, you can connect to our system and get the services. In Figure 1 we will see the UPWA
Agent is the core of UPWA and its function is to receive the IA control command requests and then return a response. In Figure 1 , UPWA Agent is composed of several components , Telephony Interface Program(TIP) 、 text to speech (TTS) 、
Network Interface Program(NIP) and WWW server. TI is an interface to receive the request form telephone and mobile phone system. By using TTS, we could transform the response message into speech and send it to users. If you use a PC to connect our system, you will communicate with NI to ask for some requests and NI will give you response. UPWA Agent make it possible that Users could use the telephony 、 WAP 、
PC to connect with UPWA and to ask the same UPWA services. From Figure 1 in our system, the components contain phone 、 PSTN 、 AGENT 、 ISAPI 、 ASP 、 DB 、
ODBC and so on are the present technology or product, but we only focus on UPWA
Agent, it could integrate three communication platforms to get the same services

anywhere all the time. UPWA Agent is not only an independent component but it should coexist with the other components in the same PC. The major assignment of
UPWA Agent is to receive the requests from mobile 、 phone 、 PC And WAP, transform the request into useful information then send the information to ASP program to handle request and store the result into database, finally reply users the message. In another word, AGENT is just like a gateway, it connect various communication systems with our system and supply message transformation. Without it, our message we can’t deliver to telephony system with different formats because of our system is web-based and all the messages are presented by words so we need
UPWA Agent to take on the job. For one thing if users connected to our system by using mobile or phone, they should send their requests on PSTN to UPWA Agent first.
From Figure 1 we knew there are five components in Agent, the telephonic analog will contact with TI and then get into our system. When users chose the service they wanted, the related parameter will be handled by WWW Server and then passed the request to ISAPI (ASP interface), according to the request ASP will find the record in database using ODBC and sent the message to user by TTS, for another if users using
PC or WAP connected to our system, NI will communicate with users and pass the requests to WWW Server.
Figure 1. The architecture of UPWA
Figure 2 shows that WAP can only accept Binary WML (coding WML) data, so we should use WAP Proxy or Gateway to exchange the coding WML. Code exchanger can only receive the data of WML format. If we want send HTML page to general WAP mobiles, we should transform the HTML age to WAP format through
HTML Filter. We think about that WAP has only little bandwidth. We can’t present all

context of HTML page. We should catch the important brief from the complicated
HTML pages, and transform the information to WML page to show on WAP mobile by WAP Server.
Figure 2. WAP mobile environment
4 、 SYSTEM FUNCTION
We made an IA controller to control the electric appliances. Its function is like a power supply. We can send a command to turn on or turn off the electric appliances.
IA controller is connected to UPWA with RS232 port.
4.1 IA Control
Users could operate PC 、 WAP mobile 、 phone to send their commands which either turns on or turns off the information appliances remotely. In other words, users connected to UPWA Agent, it will tell ASP program to deal with the command requests then send the related command to the IA controller through RS232 port.
Finally ASP program will finish the IA operation and sent the result to database in order to know the IA present status.
Now we only had one IA controller in our systems. One controller can just operate three appliances. If we want to control the more and more electric appliances, we can cascade lots of IA controller instead of creating a new hardware. Not only cascading the controller but also parallel connecting it, we can make the best choice to bring an optimum result.
4.2 function flow graph of the UPWA

UPWA is a web-based personal service system. Although our system supply services for the Internet and the wireless Internet communication platform, it is hard for telephony communication to input data. There is still something we can do which is using PC. For example, when you link up with your systems to ask for services at the first time. You should register an ID and offer your personal information for recognizing then get the services.
Figure 3. Function flow chart of the UPWA
Figure 3 shows the UPWA homepage. We can enter UPWA or register a new ID on the homepage. If we want to enter UPWA system, we should enter an ID at first.
When users want to control some electric appliances from long distant places, they have three kinds of communication tools, PC 、 WAP 、 telephony, to contact with UPWA system. In Figure 3 there are two flowing paths .
(1) From Internet ： At first, users should connect to UPWA Agent . It will distinguish the user operating PC form using Telephony, and pass the users to Network
Interface Program (NIP). It will demand users to input an ID number. When users correct the ID number and UPWA system. They will give you service by your needs and requests. Secondly, WWW Server gets the related requests and then calls the ASP program to deal with requests. Thirdly, ASP program will compare the requests with the records in Database through ODBC interface. If the IA is existent, it will be turned on and turned off according to the request. The latest IA statuses finally will be updated to database and response to the user.

(2) From PSTN ： The steps approximately are the same as the steps connecting with UPWA by PC. There is a little difference on step 1. In step 1, the telephony users will contact with Telephony
Interface Program (TIP). It will show the users what services we supply by
Text-To-Speech (TTS) and let users do some choices. Finally ASP will update the database and response the related statuses to the users by TTS.
5 、 SYSTEM OPERATION
Now, we assumed that there is a client willing to control the information appliances, and he uses PC and mobile phone respectively to connect to our system.
Figure4-a, is the web page of IA devices control. It is clear to see how many IA devices we have. If you want to change the IA devices status, you should only to press the switch button. When the client connects to our system by mobile phone, he will hear the voice flow-chart as Figure 4-b. At first, system will ask you for verifying your identification. Then it will tell you the status of all IA devices.
Following the flow path, you will finish the operation easily.
Figure 4-a

6 、 Conclusion
In order to get the same information and services as UPWA system supply on the
Internet. We integrated WAP 、 Mobile 、 phone into Web-based UPWA system. It also supply the same services no matter which communication platform you used. Now we have only one IA control service in our UPWA system, we are planning to add the e-mail service. We can extend the appliance to Home Network Applications in the future.
Acknowledgements
The research is supported by the National Science Council of the Republic of China under the grant NSC 90-2815-C-218-024-E.
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