DATAMAN Project: Towards a Mosaic-Like Location-Dependant [sic] Information Service for Mobile Clients

Arup Acharya, Tomasz Imielinski, B.R. Badrinath, Rutgers WINLAB

One-line summary: Map-centric approach: a web page defines a service with specific temporal and spatial scope, implemented as cgi-bin scripts that get the user's current location from the URL.

Overview/Main Points

Temporal and spatial scope of page data is attached to page
Resource-adaptive links: page has associated set of rsrc requirements necessary for client to retrieve it. This isn't really resource adaptivity, IMHO -- if client doesn't have the required resources, it loses.
Narrowcast: seems like broadcast to the client, but request is intelligently routed to the one appropriate server (based on location, time, etc. info). Ncast is proposed as a network primitive.
Delta publication: send only the changes since last accessed.

Relevance

Very similar to Schilit et al. Customizing Mobile Apps, but less general. Narrowcast idea is interesting, but no mention of how to implement it.

Flaws

Resource annotations are not adaptive, but limiting.
Is research general enough to support non-map-centric apps (eg time-based only)?
No description of how to actually do narrowcast, and only a weak argument that it is needed (as opposed to, say, replication or querying a nameserver instead of putting new stuff in the network layer).

Back to index