NEXUS – Distributed Data Management Concepts for Location Aware Applications

Nowadays, mobile computers like subnotebooks or personal digital assistants, as well as cellular phones can not only communicate wirelessly, but they can also determine their position via appropriate sensors like DGPS. Socalled location aware applications take advantage of this fact and structure information according to the position of their users. In order to be able to assign data to a certain location, these information systems have to refer to spatial computer models. The NEXUS1 project, which is supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation), aims at the development of a generic infrastructure that serves as a basis for location aware applications. The central task of this platform deals with the data management. Since it is intended to establish a scalable middleware that is capable of handling huge amounts of data, the system has to be organized within a distributed environment. Moreover, the data that are made available by NEXUS have to fit to the needs of all kinds of location aware applications and thus multiple representations of data sets from highly detailed to coarsely resoluted ones have to be provided.