Supporting disconnected operations in mobile computing

Mobile computing has enabled users to seamlessly access databases even when they are on the move. However, in the absence of readily available high-quality communication, users are often forced to operate disconnected from the network. As a result, software applications have to be redesigned to take advantage of this environment while accommodating the new challenges posed by mobility. In particular, there is a need for replication and synchronization services in order to guarantee availability of data and functionality, (including updates) in disconnected mode. To this end we propose a scalable and highly available data replication and management service. The proposed replication technique is compared with a baseline replication technique and shown to exhibit high availability, fault tolerance and minimal access times of the data and services, which are very important in an environment with low-quality communication links.<br /

Analysis of Parameters Affecting The Smart Phone Design By Using Fuzzy Kano Model

Mobile phones have been popular by providing with access to the internet based on evolving technology. On the global market, various companies offer different mobile phone designs with various product features. However, the significance of these features with regards to customer expectations and perception is uncertain. For this, within the scope of this study, it is aimed to classify mobile phone design features in the direction of user perception and expectation. This will allow manufacturers to develop customer expectation and perception oriented designs. In the scope of the study, the telephone design parameters were classified by using fuzzy Kano Model and the obtained classification was compared with results obtained from classic Kano Model. Kano Model surveys have been prepared to define the importance of user-oriented features in the mobile phone designs that have been recently introduced to the market and these surveys have been applied to 118 participants between 18-35 years old

Methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies. Where is their meeting point?

In this paper we review and compare the main methodologies, tools and languages for building ontologies that have been reported in the literature, as well as the main relationships among them. Ontology technology is nowadays mature enough: many methodologies, tools and languages are already available. The future work in this field should be driven towards the creation of a common integrated workbench for ontology developers to facilitate ontology development, exchange, evaluation, evolution and management, to provide methodological support for these tasks, and translations to and from different ontology languages. This workbench should not be created from scratch, but instead integrating the technology components that are currently available

Development Bvag Replication Prototype In Distributed Database Environment

Replication is a useful technique for distributed database systems. Through this technique, a data can be accessed from multiple locations. Thus, it increases data availability and accessibility to users. When one site fails, user still can access the same data at another site. Techniques such as Read-One-Write-All (ROWA), Hierarchical Replication Scheme (HRS) and Branch Replication Scheme (BRS) are the popular techniques being used for replication and data management. However, these techniques have its weaknesses in terms of communication costs. Consequently, ROWA, HRS and BRS take long executing time for a transaction since these techniques have to replicate its data to all servers. In this research, the some-data-to-some-sites scheme called Binary Vote Assignment on Grid (BVAG) is proposed. It works by considering neighbors binary vote assignment to its logical grid structure on fragmented data copies in order to manage transactions in the systems. For simplicity, the neighbours are assigned with vote one or zero. The assignment provides minimum communication cost due to the minimum number of quorum size required. In addition, it minimizes the storage capacity needed since we store database that has been fragmented. The development of prototype for the BVAG replication techniques were carried out using HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP. The prototype was developed in order to produce a web-based application that utilize BVAG replication techniques. From the development, the web based BVAG were developed and tested with basic data input to replicate the data. From the results, it shows the web based BVAG prototype is working and able to replicate data to the neighbour’s site

Impact of Mobility on Information Systems and Information System Design

The subject of this thesis is to analyse the impact of mobile hardware and software on information systems, to survey existing approaches for specifying mobile systems of computer science in general, and to provide suitable means for the formal design of information systems comprising such mobile units in particular. We consider a mobile unit to denote a mobile hardware or software entity, and a mobile system as a system comprising or being accessed by such mobile components. The various forms of mobile units occurring in computer science are explained and a taxonomy for them is developed, followed by a detailed discussion of their effects on computer and information systems. Several approaches for specifying mobile systems are presented and classified, with a particular emphasis on formal methods. As it turns out, these approaches do not allow to describe the set-up and release of communication links or to distinguish between the ever-mobile units of a compound system and those which provide the fixed subsystem as the context for the mobile entities, which are both important aspects to consider when developing information systems with mobile components. Therefore, corresponding constructs are then presented as an extension to the specification language Troll and its theoretical foundations, i.e. extended data signatures and the Module Distributed Temporal Logic Mdtl, both being interpreted over event structures. Finally, the application of the constructs is illustrated with the development of a system for accessing web services from mobile phones, which complements the ongoing example of information retrieval via mobile agents used to explain the constructs and concepts.Thema dieser Arbeit ist die Analyse der Auswirkungen von mobiler Hard- und Software auf Informationssysteme, die Untersuchung vorhandener Ansätze zur Spezifikation mobiler Systeme in der Informatik allgemein und für den formalen Entwurf von Informationssystemen mit mobilen Einheiten insbesondere. "Mobile Einheit" wird dabei als Oberbegriff für mobile Hardware- und Softwarekomponenten verwendet, und ein "mobiles System" ist ein System, das solche mobilen Komponenten beinhaltet oder auf das durch diese zugegriffen wird. Wir beschreiben die verschiedenen Formen, in denen mobile Einheiten in der Informatik auftreten, und entwickeln eine entsprechende Taxonomie, bevor wir deren Auswirkungen auf Computer- und Informationssysteme ausführlich diskutieren. Verschiedene Ansätze zur Spezifikation mobiler Systeme werden vorgestellt und eingeordnet, wobei das Augenmerk speziell auf formalen Methoden liegt. Es stellt sich heraus, dass es keiner dieser Ansätze ermöglicht, den Auf- und Abbau von Kommunikationsverbindungen zu beschreiben und zwischen den stets mobilen Einheiten und denjenigen zu unterscheiden, die das feste Teilsystem als Kontext für sie bilden. Beides sind aber wesentliche Aspekte, die in der Entwicklung von Informationssystemen mit mobilen Bestandteilen zu berücksichtigen sind. Daher stellen wir dann entsprechende Sprachkonstrukte als Erweiterung der Spezifikationssprache Troll inklusive der formalen Grundlagen vor. Diese Grundlagen beruhen auf erweiterten Datensignaturen und einer modularen verteilten temporalen Logik Mdtl, die beide über Ereignisstrukturen interpretiert werden. Schließlich wird die Verwendbarkeit der Sprachkonstrukte in der Entwicklung eines Systems zur Nutzung von Web-Diensten von Mobiltelefonen aus illustriert

M.: Data management issues in mobile and peer-to-peer environments

Abstract Mobile computing is a revolutionary technology, born as a result of remarkable advance in the development of computer hardware and wireless communication. It enables us to access information anytime and anywhere even in the absence of physical network connection. More recently, there has been increasing interest in introducing ad hoc network into mobile computing, resulting in a new distributed computing style known as peer-to-peer (P2P) computing. In this paper, we discuss the data management issues in mobile and P2P environments. The use of wireless communication makes the data availability the most important problem here, so we focus on the problem of data availability and provide detailed discussion about replicating mobile databases. Not only that, we extend our discussion to mobile-P2P environment. At the end, we discuss the general data management issues in P2P environment.