DATAMAN project: Towards a Mosaic-like Location-Dependant Information Service for Mobile Clients

The goal of the DATAMAN project is to develop primitives and build an environment for location dependant applications . In such applications, information requested by the user depends on the location from which it is accessed, and which may be invalidated or continue to be valid when a user changes location. Examples include directions to a static/mobile entity, tracking current location of mobile objects, accessing proximate services, and as indicated in [10], binding user application to nearby resources. The communication between the client and the information source/server does not necessarily have to occur over a wireless link. In fact, a mobile client may simply connect to different ports of a fixed network from different locations, and be disconnected in the interim periods. However, the typical scenario will consist of a wireless connection from a mobile client to the information service residing in the static portion of the network. The goals of this paper are twofold: first, we would like to conceptually describe the main primitives necessary to build location-dependant and wireless applications, and second, we describe the pr liminary implementation of an intelligent building that demonstrates some of the primitives. We will start with describing the proposed primitives. The implementation is described in the last section.