Integration of Web Information Sources by Mobile Users



Short Description of Project

Recently, the number of Web sites providing location-dependent information is continuously growing, and mobile users can query these Web contents through their hand-held devices. Typically, such users want to find useful information quickly according to their locations. To do so, information from these Web sites should be integrated together as a new simpler information source. However, because there are many various Web sites, preparing all possible integrations by a system designer would be expensive. A better solution is to let mobile users define necessary integration by themselves according to their purposes and locations. This requires that
  1. the integration of Web information sources must be defined (as a database view definition) by individual users on their PDAs even when the PDAs are network-disconnected; and
  2. the definitions must be materialized later by system-side servers when network connection is set up.
This work proposes a system architecture for the above usage. Firstly, to realize easy integration on PDAs, a new integration style called navigational integration of Web information sources is proposed. Thereafter a necessary wrapper/mediation architecture for materializeing the navigational integration is proposed.