A survey of SMS based Information Systems

Short Message Service (SMS) based Information Systems (SMSbIS) provide an excellent alternative to a traditional approach of obtaining specific information by direct (through phone) or indirect (IVRS, Web, Email) probing. Information and communication technology and far reaching mobile penetration has opened this new research trend Number of key players in Search industry including Microsoft and Google are attracted by the expected increase in volume of use of such applications. The wide range of applications and their public acceptance has motivated researchers to work in this research domain. Several applications such as SMS based information access using database management services, SMS based information retrieval through internet (search engine), SMS based information extraction, question answering, image retrieval etc. have been emerged. With the aim to understand the functionality involved in these systems, an extensive review of a few of these SMSbISs has been planned and executed by us. These systems are classified into four categories based on the objectives and domains of the applications. As a result of this study a well structured functional model is presented here. The model is evaluated in different dimensions, which is presented in this paper. In addition to this a chronological progress with respect to research and development in this upcoming field is compiled in this paper. Such an extensive review presented in this paper would definitely help the researchers and developers to understand the technical aspects of this field. The functional framework presented here would be useful to the system designers to design and develop an SMS based Information System of any specific domain.