MWM: Retrieval and Automatic Presentation of Manual Data for Mobile Terminals

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new way of retrieving and presenting manual data from the Web, based on a state transition diagram and data conversion into synchronized multi-modal contents. The manual data of a target device is assumed to consist of three parts: (1) manual documents in XML, (2) state transition diagrams in XML, and (3) three-dimensional computer graphics (3D CG) of the target device, which are also in XML. The prototype under development is called a Mobile Web Manual (MWM). The major features of MWM are as follows: (a) acquisition of the present state of a target device by wireless communication, (b) retrieval of manual data by finding a path between the present state and a given goal state, (c) automatic generation of 3D animation from the retrieved manual data, and (d) presentation by 3D animation synchronized with synthesized speech.

This research is partly supported by the joint research project with NTT DoCoMo, and the research is also partly supported by the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology under Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research on “New Web Retrieval Services Based on Discovery ofWeb Semantic Structures”, No. 14019048, and “Multimodal Information Retrieval, Presentation, and Generation of Broadcast Contents for Mobile Environments”, No. 14208036.