Mobile distributed information systems

In today's mobile society, access to relevant information and to context-specific services "anytime, anywhere" is becoming increasingly important. Mobile users are often particularly interested in information about and services in their immediate vicinity, thus Mobile Distributed Information Systems must address location-dependent distribution of and access to services and information from mobile devices. In addition to location, other environmental aspects, such as the user’s current situation, topology and available bandwidth of wireless networks, battery power and characteristics of mobile devices, are also relevant for determining information and service requirements. For mobile applications, a dynamic reconfigurable architecture is thus required to support flexible reaction to changing contexts and seamless operation in foreign environments, with little or no need for manual reconfiguration. In addition, the wide deployment of mobile devices requires appropriate solution to the design of optimized user interfaces and interaction models. With mobile devices becoming more and more popular and powerful, communication and cooperation between mobile users in an ad-hoc manner are strongly desired. Consequently, the long-established distinction between clients and servers is blurred, which calls for an extension of the architectural paradigm towards peers or alternating roles. This HICSS Minitrack addresses such issues and is intended to serve as a forum for the exchange of ideas in this fast-moving field.