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Data gathering using wireless technologies

Groves, Simon
 
 Simon  Groves
 BA (Hons) MSc
 Consultant
  Bicester 
 OpenMIND Consulting 
 Oxfordshire 
 United Kingdom 
OpenMIND Consulting,  Cherwell Innovation Centre, 77 Heyford Park,
Bicester  Oxfordshire  OX6 3HD United Kingdom
Phone: 01869 238080 Fax: 01869 238081 email: sgroves@open-mind.co.uk web site: www.open-mind.co.uk
 Biography
 Simon Groves - Simon works as a consultant with OpenMIND Consulting specialising in the development of Web-based applications using integrated combinations of XML, ODBC, Java, Javascript, ASP, HTML, WML and WMLScript.
 Abstract
 As the number of non-PC devices accessing the internet increases, the ability to use a single-source of information that can be tailored to the device accessing it increases. The presentation outlines how this can be achieved, with particular focus on data gathering.
 Firstly, let us assess why we need to gather data from users of a product or service. Feedback is essential if the quality of a product or service is to be assessed. Magazines often include surveys that users can fill in and return to publishers. In return for providing this information, the magazine may offer the chance to win a free subscription or some other enticement.
 However, the drawbacks of traditional paper-based data gathering techniques are many and varied, starting with the cost of distributing the survey in the first place. This may include cost of printing the survey, posting it to a representative sample of respondents and including a pre-paid envelope to encourage users to return it.
 When the organisation receives the returned surveys, responses are often double keyed into a database to avoid error. There is obviously a cost associated with this, and even then there is no guarantee that the information will be keyed correctly.
 Even if the question is entered into the database with 100% accuracy, there is no gaurantee that the respondent has answered in a non-ambiguous way. For example, consider that a survey may ask the user to identify whether they are male or female. Depending on the answer, the survey may ask men to answer questions 2-6 and women to answer questions 7-10. There is nothing to stop a respondent indicating that they are male, and then answering the questions designed specifically for women. This will effectively result in a spoiled survey.
 Web-based surveys can address these issues provided the architecture of the system is designed correctly. Firstly, distribution costs do not exist as such because the survey will be placed on a web server. There is no need to single- or double-key any responses as they are stored directly in a database for further analysis. Most importantly, web-based surveys can be designed to support question branching i.e., the next question presented to the respondent is dependent on the answer to the previous question. This removes all ambiguity from the responses given.
 So where do wireless devices fit into this scenario? Forrester research predicts that by 2002, 50% of all devices connecting to the internet will be non-PC. This means that in order to attract a representative sample of respondents, anyone wishing to gather data over the web will need to have in place an architecture that can support collection from PCs and non-PCs alike. One of the best established non-PC internet devices is the mobile phone, and already it is possible to purchase a phone that allows you to connect to selected internet services using the Wireless Access Protocol (WAP). Information is presented in WML (Wireless Markup Language), a meta-language that adheres to XML.
 The presentation will demonstrate how a single example survey can be used to gather information from a web browser on a PC and also to a mobile telephone.
 The main technical emphasis is on WML and building applications which integrate with existing data and applications rather than on WAP protocols.
 

Background

 WAP 
 		WAP technology: is it a good idea looking for a use. Is it technology for its own sake? Is it practical to surf the Web using a telephone?
 Some predictions about mobile commerce from The Open Group:
 
  • The global Mobile Commerce market is set to reach 50 million customers by year end 2001.
    •  
  • The global market for mobile devices is larger than that for personal computers.
    •  
  • Everyone will have one or more mobile devices.
    •  
  • The mobile device will become the preferred means of personal communication for both voice and data
    •  
  • Customers will be able to access comprehensive personalized product and service information – and make their purchases instantaneously.
    •  But is this all hype? In the real world, in a typical real-life business, what benefit can be gained from using wireless devices to gather and consolidate data?
     WML 
         		Working with a client in the automotive industry, OpenMIND have implemented an applicaton to test out an application implemented over the Internet, accessible from desktop browsers and from WAP-enabled devices e.g. mobile phones. It is a real business requirement that is likely to be supported by this type of application. This paper looks at the characteristics of the requirement that make it appropriate to useWML technology. It goes on to describe how we used the technology to address the requirement. It ends with looking at some of the issues that will affect future development of this type of application.
     

    The business requirement

     CareerMAP is a training scheme devised by a European motor vehicle manufacturer and retailer. It is the name given to their Modern Apprentice (MA) Programme which the manufacturer is in the process of revamping in line with its overall business strategy. The programme will change the way the existing MA scheme is managed within the manufacturer's retail dealerships around the UK. A key feature of the programme is its use of Internet technology to support the delivery of education in a controlled, distributed environment. In order to reinforce commitment from local vehicle retailers, the programme manager committed himself to carry out a survey of opinion around the country. This feedback was used to configure the programme in accordance with dealerships' views.
     WML 
         		Various mechanisms were used to gather the feedback from dealers: personal visits, visits by representatives, paper mailings, survey feedback pages on the Web Site and, as an experiment, aWML interface to the survey database to be used bycool associates of the programme.
     

    Solution

     

    Why wireless devices?

     Image is everything. The representatives are out visiting vehicle retail outlets. Vehicles are becoming more and more sophisticated. We are keen to show that we have technology in place that is at the cutting edge. Yes, it is a gimmick, but we want to capture people's attention, make our apprentice programme stand out from the crowd.
     WAP 
         		However, it is also cost effective. There are some 150 representatives around the country. To equip them all with aWAP -enabled mobile phone would cost approximately £20,000 (capital cost), whereas to provide them all with an internet-enabled mobile personal computer would run to some £225,000. This is a considerable cost difference.
     The main problem in March 2000 was not the cost or training implications of rolling out a wireless solution, however, it was the availability in the UK of Internet-navigation capable mobile phones. There was a choice of 2 telephone handsets, one of which had a four week waiting list for delivery, and one which was impossible to come by in retail outlets.
     

    Technical

     WAP 
         		The main technical elements of aWAP -enabled Internet application are summarised below:
     
     
  • WAP Gateway - for public access, this is provided by the telephone service provider i.e. in the UK: BT Cellnet, Orange, Vodafone. For a dedicated corporate solution, providing restricted access to an authorised set of users, this gateway could be provided by a company for its own applications and user community.
    •  
  • IP Connection between WAP Gateway and Internet (TCP/IP) - this interface is usually administered by the provider of the WAP Gateway. Without this interface, the WAP Gateway is essentially a dead end.
    •  
  • Web Application Server - small changes need to be made to the Web Server to ensure it supports files of type WML, WMLC, WMLS and WMLSC. This is required to instruct the server how to handle requests for the appropriate file types. In our case, it is an ASP-enabled Internet Information Server. Development and testing is carried out on Personal Web Server using WAP development toolkits from UP and Nokia.
    •  
  • WAP and Internet enabled Mobile Phone - these handsets are available at the high end of the price band, naturally.
    •  

    Database linkage

     What database connections are in place and how do we make the link?
     ODBC  
         		The HTML based application usesODBC connectivity to communicate with a Microsoft Access database to store and retrieve the results of the survey. The HTML is delivered from a Microsoft Internet Information Server using Active Server Pages containingADO calls to retrieve and store data. In terms of technology, this involves using VBScript, WML and WML Script. VBScript is used to access the local file system, to communicate with the Web server and access data. WML is used to control layout and application flow in the user interface. WMLScript is used to provide procedural application logic support.
    ADO, Active Data Objects
         		The WAP-enabled service uses the same architecture to deliver WML pages instead of HTML. We are able to ensure that all data (whether from the WML or the HTML services) is stored in a common area.
     

    Tips, tricks and lessons

     This section addresses issues that we have learned about this technology and the approach to using it over the last few weeks of development.
     

    Why WML?

     Using a WAP-enabled mobile phone it is possible to browse the Internet's current content. This provides a way to interpret existing HTML-based sites, so what value do we get from WML?
     Of course, sites dedicated to being viewed through traditional browsers tend to rely more on graphical content than it is possible to provide on the current generation of mobile devices. There appear to be no plans to port Flash or AVI formats to the platform: if nothing else, the bandwidth will militate against that in the short to medium term. Micro-browsers supplied in today's mobile phones will work very well with text-based versions of sites supported by traditional HTTP servers. However, even text-only versions of Web pages tend to be too wordy for an Internet-enabled mobile phone. They can even allow a phone user to enter information into Web forms and submit it in the traditional way. Internet mobile phones provide an adequate re-interpretation of well-formed HTML.
     However, for those of you who remember the days of Gophers and Veronica on the Internet, the Web by mobile phone is just as much a disappoint as it always was. Remember when you showed non-techno friends the latest World Wide Web thing, and their reaction was: "Is that all there is?" Web via WAP is like that: slow transfer rates, small screens, words and no pictures.
     WML allows you to build applications dedicated to mobile phone users. They contain rudimentary graphics, content can be focussed to give the best layout for the keyhole screen, you can work within the restricted level of memory currently available, you can almost guarantee how your applications will be interpreted (almost). In fact, WAP and WML provide application developers with the opportunity to reclaim the Internet for the geeks: the opportunity to wrest control back from corporate marketing.
     

    Application layout and design

     Small Screen Real Estate. The small screen size currently available provides a real challenge to today's WML application designers. The availability of Graphical User Interfaces have spoiled us. We assume there will always be a little more that we can do. One more fancy trick we can pull. With the current generation of handsets available, there is only limited scope for frills. In fact, you cannot even guarantee exactly how much screen space there will be in the micro-browser on different handsets. A carefully crafted graphic will be just too big for some people, just too small for others.
     Limited set of elements at your disposal. There are at present only a limited set of tags supported by WML: namely to provide paragraphs, rudimentary tables, event "buttons" and simple graphics.
     Specialised version of an application rather than re-using HTML. Today's mobile phones are capable of delivering the text content of existing Web pages, however, this can make for an unusable application. Who wants to read the full text version of a broadsheet newspaper's Grand Prix report 8 words at a time on a phone display? To make the most of the medium demands a dedicated set of pages delivering cut-down content.
     Varying interpretations of the application. With desktop browsers, one man's HTML does not look quite like another. It is the same with current WML-interpreting micro-browsers. A good example is the <SELECT> or <OPTION> tag which causes varying behaviours even within phones supplied by the same manufacturer (if their emulators are to be believed).
     

    Application structure

     Decks and Cards structure. The basic application architecture revolves around a metaphor built on Decks and Cards. Loosely, a card is a screen or transaction and a deck is an application, or series of cards. A deck contains a series of cards. Control is passed from card to card within decks or from deck to deck. Decks can also make use of procedural code stored in external script files.
     WMLScript. Procedural logic is implemented as a series of functions in WMLScript which approximates to Javascript in HTML. It can be used to perform calculations based on screen inputs, store and work with memory variables etc.
     Memory constraints on emulators/phones. Even in the early days of development using emulators only, we came up against memory usage problems: Nokia's emulator would run a deck that the UP emulator complained about. Even on my handset, there are occasional errors such as "Error 12011: HTML Translator is out of disk space".
     Limited development tools. At time of writing there are two freely available toolkits in which to develop WML decks: the UP.SDK from Phone.com which contains the UP.Simulator and the Nokia WAP toolkit. It is of course possible to develop applications using standard Web page editing tools, using these simulator products to demonstrate the resulting code. The Nokia toolkit, in particular, provides a range of features and supporting technical documentation describing WML syntax and requirements.
     Speed of delivery of an application to the handset. Currently, GSM mobile phones in the UK transfer data at the rate of 9600bps. When typical PC transfer rates exceed this by a factor of 5, the difference can be a little frustrating. The constraints of text-only delivery, however, mitigate this problem. This, of course, makes it all too irritating accessing non-WAP friendly sites from a mobile phone: in fact, it can render a web site useless.
     PDA 
         		Limited data entry facilities from a phone keypad. If you have tried to use a telephone keypad to write a message, you know the problem. Features like "predictive text input" from Nokia and "iTap" from Motorola purport to make things easier. But roll on the next generation of WAP-awarePDA devices with predictive handwriting recognition. Now that is bound to make things easier! Or voice-enabled PDAs that let you say "double-u double-u double-u dot oh pee ee en dash em eye en dee dot see oh dot you kay enter". That is bound to make things easier.
     

    Accessing databases

     WML and its associated scripting language are designed to deliver client-side applications and, as such, do not have in-built access to databases. In order to deliver information from databases, it is necessary to supplement these facilities with a server-side scripting environment such as ASP or CGI. In the CareerMAP application, deployed on a Microsoft Internet Information Server, we used ASP and VBScript to link to ADO objects.
     

    Deploying the application

     Very few changes need to be made on the server in order to start delivering WML-enabled applications. The major factor is to extend the scope of supported file formats on the server to support files of type WML and WMLS. All the hard work is done by the WAP gateways that convert the telephone protocols to tcp/ip packets.
     The real development challenge is to integrate WML applications and HTML applications at the code level rather than at the database level: to write intelligent code that knows what format of markup to deliver to which type of browser.
     

    Example application

     The application was originally developed as part of the existing Web Site in order to support our contention that the CareerMAP programme is taking the manufacturer on into new technology areas. It was designed to allow registered members of the programme to express their opinions on certain key issues regarding future developments in the MA programme. The registered users in this case refer either to the 800+ dealerships spread round the country or to the 120+ representatives of the training management organisation that recruit apprentices and dealerships into the programme.
     The application is availale either as an HTML-based page for traditional browser access, or as a WML-based application, both of which store data into a common area.
     Using the Nokia emulator, the following screen shots show several views of the application during its early stages of development. The first diagram illustrates an entry point into the survey.
     On the whole, these emulator screen shots give a faithful presentation of how the application will appear on a genuine mobile phone display. The second screen grab shows a selection menu to control navigation around the application.
     The next shots illustrate a selection sequence as it is supported in the micro-browsers within the two Nokia models. Note there are several differences in screen layouts, fonts, wording on the menu options and the selection mechanism itself. These two examples come from Nokia's 6150 emulation.
     The next two examples come from the Nokia 6110 emulation.
     And a final sign off after the dealer's views have been submitted.
     

    Future plans

     Where will the application go next?
     WAP 
     WML 
         		We are gradually proving this approach with the organisations concerned. At present, they are pleased to be at the forefront of technology, however, there are some inevitable frustrations: size of the screen, usability of phone-based text entry systems, availaility of handsets and so on. Selected representatives are becoming used to this method of entering information and we are exploring ways in which we could support them further in their work: other applications that would neatly fit this model. We now have the technology to start to explore how farWAP andWML applications can go.
     We are currently looking at other business areas to which we may be able to deliver applications to support a similarly widely-dispersed field force.
     In the UK, there will be available later this year the second generation of WAP-type protocols available to support higher bandwidths and faster access. However, any applications built to exploit these developments will still revolve around WML (albeit an expanded version of the current standard). Any effort expended now in understanding the structural constraints imposed by the technologies will not be wasted.
     Bibliography
     
    1 Bringing WAP to the World, Simon Bisson, Application Development Advisor, Jan/Feb 2000
     
    2 Getting Started, Developer’s Guide, WML Reference, WMLScript Reference, NOKIA WAP TOOLKIT Version 1.2, September, 1999
     
    3 MobileLifeStream papers on WAP and associated technologies: www.mobilelifestream.com
     
    4 The Open Group site on Mobile Commerce, www.opengroup.org
    Mobile commerce and WML   Table of contents   Indexes   XML &, eBusiness: a technical perspective