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The UAProf (User Agent Profile) specification is concerned with capturing capability and preference information for wireless devices. This information can be used by content providers to produce content in an appropriate format for the specific device. UAProf is related to the Composite Capability/Preference Profiles Specification created by the
World Wide Web Consortium The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working together in ...
. UAProf is based on RDF. UAProf files typically have the file extensions rdf or xml, and are usually served with mimetype application/xml. They are an
XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing data. It defines a set of rules for encoding electronic document, documents in a format that is both human-readable and Machine-r ...
-based file format. The RDF format means that the document schema is extensible. A UAProf file describes the capabilities of a mobile handset, including Vendor, Model, Screensize, Multimedia Capabilities, Character Set support, and more. Recent UAProfiles have also begun to include data conforming to MMS, PSS5 and PSS6 schemas, which includes much more detailed data about video, multimedia, streaming and MMS capabilities. A mobile handset sends a header within an http request, containing the URL to its UAProf. The http header is usually X-WAP-Profile:, but sometimes may look more like 19-Profile:, WAP-Profile: or a number of other similar headers. UAProf production for a device is voluntary: for
GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...
devices, the UAProf is normally produced by the vendor of the device (e.g.
Nokia Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational corporation, multinational telecommunications industry, telecommunications, technology company, information technology, and consumer electronics corporation, originally established as a pulp mill in 1 ...
,
Samsung Samsung Group (; stylised as SΛMSUNG) is a South Korean Multinational corporation, multinational manufacturing Conglomerate (company), conglomerate headquartered in the Samsung Town office complex in Seoul. The group consists of numerous a ...
, LG) whereas for
CDMA Code-division multiple access (CDMA) is a channel access method used by various radio communication technologies. CDMA is an example of multiple access, where several transmitters can send information simultaneously over a single communicatio ...
/
BREW Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless (BREW, also known as Brew MP or Qualcomm BREW) is an obsolete application development platform created by Qualcomm, originally for code division multiple access (CDMA) mobile phones, featuring third-party a ...
devices it's more common for the UAProf to be produced by the telecommunications company. A content delivery system (such as a WAP site) can use UAProf to adapt content for display, or to decide what items to offer for download. However, drawbacks to relying solely on UAProf are (See also ): # Not all devices have UAProfs (including many new Windows Mobile devices, iDen handsets, or legacy handsets) # Not all advertised UAProfs are available (about 20% of links supplied by handsets are dead or unavailable, according to figures from UAProfile.com) # UAProf can contain schema or data errors which can cause parsing to fail # Retrieving and parsing UAProfs in real-time is slow and can add substantial overhead to any given web request: necessitating the creation of a Device Description Repository to cache the UAProfs in, and a workflow to refresh UAProfs to check for deprecation. # There is no industry-wide data quality standard for the data within each field in an UAProf. # The UAProf document itself does not contain the user agents of the devices it might apply to in the schema (Nokia put it in the comments). # UAProf headers can often be plain wrong. (i.e. for a completely different device) UAProf device profiles are one of the sources of device capability information for
WURFL WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and an XML configuration file which contains information about device capabilities and features for a variety of mobile devices, focused o ...
, which maps the UAProfile schema to its own with many other items and boolean fields relating to device markup, multimedia capabilities and more. This XML data is keyed on the User-Agent: header in a web request. Another approach to the problem is to combine real-time derived information, component analysis, manual data and UAProfiles to deal with the actual device itself rather than the idealised representation of "offline" approaches such as UAProf or WURFL. This approach allows detection of devices modified by the user,
Windows Mobile Windows Mobile is a discontinued mobile operating system developed by Microsoft for smartphones and personal digital assistants (PDA). Designed to be the portable equivalent of the Windows desktop OS in the emerging Mobile device, mobile/port ...
devices, Legacy devices,
Spider Spiders (order (biology), order Araneae) are air-breathing arthropods that have eight limbs, chelicerae with fangs generally able to inject venom, and spinnerets that extrude spider silk, silk. They are the largest order of arachnids and ran ...
s and
Bots The British Overseas Territories (BOTs) or alternatively referred to as the United Kingdom Overseas Territories (UKOTs) are the fourteen dependent territory, territories with a constitutional and historical link with the United Kingdom that, ...
, and is evidenced in at least one commercially available system. The W3C MWI (Mobile Web Initiative) and the associated DDWG (Device Description Working Group), recognising the difficulty in collecting and keeping track of UAProfs and device handset information, and the practical shortcomings in the implementation of UAProf across the industry have outlined specifications for a Device Description Repository, in the expectation that an ecosystem of such Repositories will eventually eliminate the need for local device repositories in favour of a web service ecosystem.


See also

*
WURFL WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe) is a set of proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) and an XML configuration file which contains information about device capabilities and features for a variety of mobile devices, focused o ...
* Apache Mobile Filter


References


External links

*
UAProf list (en/fr)
{{DEFAULTSORT:Uaprof Mobile software Wireless networking