Guest editorial: mobile services on the Web

Advances in the Web and mobile technologies offer new and exciting services to users in various domains such as e-business, healthcare, entertainment, and scientific activities. With the advances in mobile technologies, the Web gets richer in its contents and usability. In addition to its widespread usability in the e-commerce, education, and media, the Web has established its roots in exchanging and sharing information in social communities. For example, user-generated contents in the social networks have transformed the Web into a new era of the Web 2.0—these contents comprise a wealth of information often involving multimedia data such as audio, video, pictures and blogs. Indeed, the Web is slowly evolving from current “Web of Content”, “Web of People”, into “Web of Things and Services”, given the recent advances such as radio-frequency identification (RFID), sensor networks, and service-oriented computing (SOC). These new developments however introduce many new challenging and unsolved problems. One of the major issues is to deal with the resource scarcity in mobile environments. Though mobile devices and wireless networks are improving their resources, they are still far behind the wired networks and desktop PCs in terms of bandwidth, memory, processing speed and battery power. In addition, users expect mobile services to be intelligent and context-aware.