The present invention relates to a portal application for providing access from a client to a multimedia service, to a method for accessing a portal application from a client as well as co a multimedia service comprising a portal application.
The present invention generally lies in the field of mobile multimedia systems, computer networking, distributed processing systems, databases, hand-held computers and wireless communication. The invention particularly relates to the management of services which can represent the information in different kinds of mark-up languages.
Providing mobile internet to cellular phones is possible through the introduction of special adapted web pages. Theses web pages must be provided through a particular mark-up language (C-HTML in Japan, WAP in Europe, HDML in the USA). The offered services might be the same but differ in presentation and interaction with the user. Providing services to normal web customers but also for mobile users requires the coding of the service for all these different users. If in the future additional further mark-up languages might arise (e.g. in the broadcasting industry) the effort for providing services to users via these further mark-up languages will still increase.
From the prior art so-called service portals are well known. Service portals provide a suit of services of the internet. The basic idea of the service portals is to give the user access to a set of services, so that he will stay longer with the selected portal provider and so that he will return more often.
Mobile service portals are an extension of the service portal idea to wireless internet services. These services are usually provided through special wireless access protocols, but also use mark-up languages that are specially targeted for the mobile device (e.g. Compact HTML in Japan, WAP in the GSM world or HDML in America).
Normally the functions for handling the portal functions (e.g. user identification, service profile, etc.) and the mobile services are directly mixed. For example scripts, graphics and other objects might be stored together.
Building a mobile service portal requires the provision of an infrastructure of common scripts used by the different services. The set of available services must be managed on a per-user base. Especially free services and subscribed services must be separated and managed individually. Different devices (especially mobile devices) require different mark-up languages for presenting the service to a user. Besides that the used service logic and the components executing the logic should remain the same. Some device types might not support a full range of mark-up tags. In this case the service designer would like to prepare adapted pages optimised just for the targeted device type.