Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems: Summing up Achievements of the Past Decade

This special issue represents the best papers presented at the “Mobility in Databases and Distributed Systems” (MDDS’99) workshop held in September of 1999 in Florence, Italy. The year 1999 was a milestone in a sense that it marked the end of an era in mobile database management research where focus was on human interaction and on extending classical concepts of distributed databases and systems to cater for mobility. These selected papers reflect the state of the art in the issues of mobility in mobile data management and can serve as a summary of the achievements of the past decade; they also look ahead at forthcoming research challenges and opportunities. The MDDS workshop is an annual international workshop running in conjunction with DEXA (www.dexa.org) conference series. Its goals are expressed succinctly in the editors’ message for MDDS’99 (DEXA W/S Proceedings (CS Press, 1999) p. 72):