An Interface-Driven Approach to Information Provision - CiteSeerX

An Interface-Driven Approach to Information Provision: Providing Agrarian Prices Krithi Ramamritham, Anirudha Joshi, Subhasri Dattagupta , Gaurav Mathur,, Tushar Vilankar Media Lab Asia, IIT Bombay, Mumbai- 400 076

Motivation and summary of contributions: An important aspect of E-governance is to satisfy the information needs of the common man. Unfortunately, today, in most areas of the world, while there is no dearth of data, information is a scarce commodity. This occurs in spite of the ubiquity of portals from which one can extract or derive needed information. Two reasons contribute to the phenomenon: (1) Information is often made available as database tables, which are difficult to navigate for a common man and contribute to information overload, and (2) database access is through key phrases, often in English which, in nations like India, with large multilingual and semi-literate populations, essentially boils down to the information being unavailable or inaccessible. For example, the price related data available from the Government of India’s site http://www.agmarknet.nic.in/ is shown below.

Keeping these phenomena in mind, a system for providing agrarian pricing information to the rural Indian populace has been successfully developed as a part of Media Lab Asia

activities at IIT Bombay. The system, called Bhav Puchiye (meaning, "ask for the price", in Hindi), incorporates innovations from the perspective of interface design as well as from the perspective of data provisioning. Bhav Puchiye is an online application, accessible using a Web browser, for getting the price information of agrarian products at the nearby mandis (i.e., wholesale markets). The motivation is to empower producers of agricultural commodities with information that will allow them maximize their revenues by eliminating inaccurate or false information often resulting from the presence of middlemen or agents. We use the Inverted Pyramid Approach, which is specifically designed keeping in mind the needs of farmers, who form the major part of Indian populace. To ensure deeper penetration in rural India the application is designed to be made available online, accessible through kiosks or telecenters in villages or via telephones. Bhav Puchiye eliminates the need for textual input from a user, but without employing pull-down menus, ubiquitous in interface design today. Instead, it uses an "Inverted Pyramid Approach" to give the maximum relevant results to the end users with minimal inputs from the users. Specifically, a completely iconic interface is presented to a user who visits one of the telecenters, which are beginning to dot the rural Indian landscape. The interface incorporates multiple panels, neatly juxtaposed with each other. They present a choice of commodities (from which a user chooses the commodity of interest), a map of the state or district the user is from -- with nearby towns, cities, etc. highlighted and the user's location at the center of the map and a calendar (from which the user selects the date of interest).

The user's choices are translated into a database query sent to a central repository, the results from which are returned to the user in the form of visuals that embellish the original screen. The currently implemented system caters to the residents of Pabal, a remote village 200 Km from Mumbai. However, to serve the needs of a diverse population across India, the

system is designed to be "self-learning", so that it can anticipate the requests of users from different locations. It achieves its goals by maintaining a history of commodities and prices of interest to users in a particular location and exploits technologies used in personalization and prediction. Furthermore, to cater to the needs of locations connected by unreliable network connections, caching, prefetching (through prediction of future needs), and profiling technologies are also being integrated with the system. Details of the Inverted Pyramid Approach to Information provision: Scientific, academic papers are usually written with the regular pyramid approach: starting with an introduction, review of prior work, followed by a hypothesis, experimental results and finally the conclusion. Jakob Nielsen had propounded the Inverted Pyramid approach in 1996 for writings on the web. Today almost all sites especially those providing information of interest to the masses follow the approach.

Standard vs. Inverted Pyramid Approach A typical interface designed for an application such as Bhav Puchiye with various parameters to be controlled might have designed the interface in a three stepped manner: select a produce, select a place (market) and select a date. But this leads to at least three

interactions before the first bit of useful information is seen by the user. Start

Home

Pune

Shikrapur

Potato

Tomato

Today

Yesterday

Sangli

Tomato

Standard pyramid approach The visual interface that we have designed attempts to minimize the number and complexity of interactions. For example, it pushes information up the hierarchy by showing the ‘most probably city of interest’, for the ‘most probably asked commodity’ on the ‘most probable dates’. The visual interface is designed to provide as many visual clues as possible. The interface provides information about the selected vegetable produce at most of the nearby markets. The farmer then depending on the prices indicated and on the distance of the market from the originating place can decide where to sell his produce to get the maximum profit. The price information for many markets is provided to the user at the beginning itself. The interface further gives the user a method to ‘navigate’ by changing the place, item or date. Details of the Bhav Puchiye Architecture: A flash interface provides the user options to select from three main categories: Commodity, Date, and Place. The place is personalized to a user, i.e., if a user has logged in to the system, say from the Indian state from Andhra Pradesh for the first time, then using the inverted pyramid approach, information most commonly sought information by farmers in the area are returned to him in the local language, in this case, Telugu. The user has the option of changing the defaults for the date of interest, the commodities and the place (market), using the mouse. As soon as a user’s click is registered, it is sent to a J2EE server which then processes the clicks into meaningful queries which are then translated into queries and sent to the JAVA Servlet engine. Using a local database into which information often sought is periodically prefetched from the NIC website (which provides prices in raw tabular form) and cached, this engine responds to user queries without remote access.

NIC Site Flash Interface (front end) J2EE Web Server

Java Servlet

XML Parser

Web Prefetcher

Bhav Puchiye DB

SYSTEM OVERVIEW The Bhav Poochiye database comprises mainly of tables that include the market name, arrival quantity (in quintals in a particular market), commodity,specific variety of produce for a particular commodity, low, median, and high rates, and date. The J2EE server also incorporates an XML parser for parsing the relevant information that the user provides when he registers a click that corresponds to a choice of commodity/date/place or a request for a change in visual layout as per his/her choice. These choices are also stored in the database to create a user history and profile so that the next time when the same user logs in, the system intelligently returns the relevant information as indicated by the users history. To cater to those situations where specific authorized users may have data more up-todate data than the NIC website, we have also provided a mechanism for authorized (and typically relatively more sophisticated than those who simply seek information) users to update the contents of the Bhav Puchiye Database using the following interface:

Voice User Interface for Bhav Puchiye:

We have also designed a voice-based interface for Bhav Puchiye. As explained in the visual interface, if designed in accordance with the standard pyramid approach, the system might first ask the user to select a particular market, then a single produce and finally a date. This would not only have increased the interaction time before providing any information but also would have made it difficult to change one parameter while retaining the other previously selected parameters. Ours is instead founded on the principles of the inverted pyramid. Transcripts of some of the responses generated when a user calls Bhav Puchiye are provided below in English: “At Pune market the price of potato, Grade B, was Rs. 450 per quintal, onion was Rs. 230, per quintal and rice was Rs. 1700 per quintal on 7th March. To change the market press 1, to change the produce press 2, to change quality of produce press 3 and to change the date press 4.” User: Presses 1 System: “For Shikrapur press 1, for Ahmednagar press 2, for Sangli press 3, for Kolhapur press 4, for Jalgaon press 5, for Solapur press 6, for Mumbai press 7,To go back press 8. User: Presses 2” System: “You selected Ahmednagar. At Ahmednagar market the price of potato, Grade B, was Rs. 550 per quintal, onion was Rs. 300, per quintal and rice was Rs. 1800 per quintal on 7th March. To change the market press 1, to change the produce press 2 and to change the date press 3.” More sophisticated responses and reduced response times are possible, with voice recognition. For example, a user’s profile can be used to determine his usual needs and only after catering to those, the system provides options for the user to seek more information. Deployment Plans and the Future: In the current phase, Bhav Puchiye is being deployed in Pabal (63 kms) off Pune in Maharashtra state of India, where the local language is Marathi and Hindi. Based on the feedback from this phase, we plan to move to Kuppam town on the border of the states of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Tamilnadu, where Tamil, Telugu, Kannada are the lingua franca. These deployments will help in the testing of the proposed interface and database infrastructures and help to verify the assumptions and judge the efficiency of the interface. Concurrently we plan to test the audio interfaces as well. REFERENCES

1.Advantages of the Inverted Pyramid Style, (http://www.tpub.com/journalist/11.htm). 2.Shneiderman, Ben, Designing the user interface, Pearson Education Pte. Ltd., India Branch, Delhi. 2002. 3.Solso, Robert L., Cognitive Psychology, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., New York. 1979. Pg 176. 4. Horodezky, Sam, VoiceUI.Info: The Art & Science of Voice Dialogue Design, (http://www.voiceui.info/)