Audio Wiki for Mobile Communities: Information System for the Rest of Us

In this paper, we describe the idea of Audio Wiki – community information system that can be used with mobile phone. We also present the design and development of MobilED server empowering the Audio Wiki. The MobilED server makes it possible to use MediaWiki server as the Content Management System of an audio information system. User can make a query to the MediaWiki server by sending a search term as an SMS message to the service number. After a while the user will receive a call back from the server and a speech synthesizer will read the content found from the MediaWiki under the search term. During the call users may also add audio annotations to any of the sections of the article. In the paper we propose MobilED server to be the information system of people who do not or do not want to have access to Internet and WWW. We claim that the people with strong mobile phone user culture will probably more likely adapt to the use of mobile phones with communities information systems of their local and real communities than use of Internet and WWW in the same situation.