Mobile Data Management

We are rapidly heading towards a world in which the computing infrastructure will contain billions of devices, which will interact with other computing/communications devices that are carried or worn by users as they go through their daily routines. Such devices will provide data access to mobile users as they move within buildings, cities, or across the globe. This new infrastructure presents tremendous challenges for data management technology, including: huge scale; variable and intermittent connectivity; location and context-aware applications; bandwidth, power, and devi- size limitations; and multimedia data delivery across hybrid networks and systems. Traditional data management technologies such as query processing, transaction management, workflow, business process management, and metadata management must all be reevaluated in this emerging environment. Furthermore, nontraditional issues such as the semantics of mobile data, location-dependent querying, broadcast and multicast delivery, and caching/prefetching techniques must all be addressed. The ability to track people as they move about their daily tasks raises serious issues of security and privacy. This conference is the fourth in the Mobile Data Management series, focusing on the challenges and opportunities for the management of data in mobile, pervasive, and wearable computing. MDM 2000 and 2001 were in Hong Kong and MDM 2002 was in Singapore. Eighty-seven papers were submitted to the conference from 23 countries and were subject to a rigorous review procedure. Every paper had three or four independent reviews. Twenty-one full papers and 15 short papers from both academia and industry were selected for publication in this volume of proceedings.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Mobile Data Management, MDM 2003, held in Melbourne, Australia, in January 2003. The 21 revised full papers and 15 revised short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 87 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on storage management, location tracking, information management, location-aware services, context-aware services, resource discovery, location management, storage management and query processing, and context-aware information services.