DETERMINING A PROPERTY OF A COMMUNICATION DEVICE

• US 20110047249A1
• Filed: 02/12/2009
• Published: 02/24/2011
• Est. Priority Date: 02/12/2008
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Deviceatlas Limited
• Original Assignee: mTLD Top Level Domain Limited
• Inventors: Pearce, James
• Granted Patent: US 9,185,182 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 709/219
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/322 Trees
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/951 Indexing; Web crawling techniques
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/955 using information identifiers, e.g. uniform resource locators [URL]
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9577 Optimising the visualization of content, e.g. distillation of HTML documents
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 40/146 Coding or compression of tree-structured data
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/04 specially adapted for terminals or networks with limited capabilities; specially adapted for terminal portability
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/1097 for distributed storage of data in networks, e.g. transport arrangements for network file system [NFS], storage area networks [SAN] or network attached storage [NAS]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/303 Terminal profiles

Abstract

A mobile communication device (1) sends an HTTP request for a Web resource over a mobile network (3) to a Web server (2). The USER AGENT string of the HTTP request is used by the Web server (2) to retrieve properties of the mobile communication device (1) from device properties stored in a device property store (4). The device properties are referenced by nodes of a tree of sample USER AGENT strings for sample mobile communication devices.

Claims

1. A method of determining a property for a subject communication device, which subject communication device has a string of characters associated with it, the method comprising:

receiving the string of characters associated with the subject communication device; and

using the received string of characters to retrieve a property from a store of previously identified properties of sample communication devices, wherein the previously identified properties in the store are referenced by nodes of a tree of sample strings of characters similarly associated with the sample communication devices.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the received string of characters is included in a request sent by the subject communication device for content to be provided to it.

4. The method of claim 1, wherein both the received string of characters and the sample strings of characters are user agent strings.

5. The method of claim 2, wherein the received string of characters is a field of the request indicating the type of content preferred by the communication device.

6. The method of claim 1, wherein the previously identified properties in the store are referenced by nodes of more than one tree of sample strings of characters, the type of sample strings of characters being different for different trees.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein each previously identified property is referenced by the first node along the tree common to the sample communication devices having that previously identified property.

8. The method of claim 1, wherein the nodes comprise substrings of the strings of characters.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein the substrings comprise serial parts of the sample strings of characters.

10. The method of claim 8, wherein the substrings comprise consecutive parts of the sample strings of characters.

11. The method of claim 1, wherein no node of the tree has only one child node unless that child node that references a property.

12. The method of claim 1, wherein no node of the tree both has no children and does not reference a property.

13. The method of claim 1, wherein the properties comprise attributes that have values.

14. The method of claim 1, wherein a node is flagged when it references a property comprising an attribute with a value and there is a later node along the tree that references a property comprising the same attribute with a different value.

15. The method of claim 1, wherein the properties are provided in a look up table referenced by nodes of the tree.

16. The method of claim 1, wherein the tree comprises a serial code.

17. The method of claim 1, wherein the retrieving a property from the store comprises querying the tree with a function including the received string of characters.

18. A method of determining multiple properties for the subject communication device using the method of claim 1 to retrieve multiple previously identified properties from the store.

20. The method of claim 1, wherein the subject communication device is wireless.

21. The method of claim 1, wherein the content is a Web resource.

22. A computer program product adapted to carry out the method of claim 1 when processed by computer processing means.

23. Apparatus for determining a property of a communication device, the apparatus comprising a processor for carrying out the method of claim 1.

3. A method of providing content to a subject communication device over a communications system, which subject communication device has a string of characters associated with it, the method comprising:

receiving a request from the subject communication device for content to be provided to it, the request including the string of characters associated with the communication device;

determining a property for the subject communication device by using the received string of characters to retrieve a property from a store of previously identified properties of sample mobile devices; and

optimising the content based on the retrieved property, wherein the previously identified properties in the store are referenced by nodes of a tree of sample strings of characters similarly associated with the sample communication devices.

19. The method of claim 3, comprising determining multiple properties for the subject communication device by using the received string of characters to retrieve multiple previously identified properties from the store.

24. Apparatus for providing content to a user over a communications system, the apparatus comprising a processor for carrying out the method of claim 3.

25. A Web server comprising the apparatus of claim 24.

26. The method of claim 3, wherein the received string of characters is a field of the request indicating the type of content preferred by the communication device.