Device Personalisation — Where Content Meets Device

The explosive growth of the Internet has come with increasing diversity and heterogeneity in terms of access device, device capability, network access method, bandwidth, and user preferences. Most Internet services and World Wide Web content has been designed with desktop computers in mind, and often contains rich media, such as images, audio, and video. In many cases this content is not suitable for the new (often mobile) client devices because of their limitations in terms of screen size, memory, media support, connection speed, etc. These shortcomings have prompted the need to adapt the services and content of the Internet. This is broadly known as content negotiation and requires consideration of the client device's capabilities and characteristics (both hardware and software), the connection type and speed/bandwidth, and the user's preferences.