A Service Architecture for Intellectual Work on Mobile Devices

Recent proliferation of cell phone and mobile computing technologies has yielded an opportunity to design software systems intended to facilitate collaboration and teamwork among geographically dispersed users. On-the-go collaboration on portable computers, however, cannot be facilitated with traditional Computer Mediated Collaborative Systems (CMCS)s [1] typically deployed on desktop computers. In the last couple of years, several architectures and software systems have been designed with the mobile platform in mind. The Wireless Internet Collaborative System (WICS) is one such CMCS. The design of WICS depicts an example of an architecture tailored especially to the mobile platform [2]. The WICS is furthermore designed especially for intellectual teamwork on-the-go. The architecture of the WICS integrates a dynamic services component intended as an on-the-go, plug-and-play feature where each user will be able to choose any number of available services depending on their needs. The application of services in the mobile computing domain has been previously outlined by Dustdar and Gall [3]. Dustdar and Gall introduce a peer-to-peer architecture with similar goals to the client/server architecture of WICS, namely to allow participants to collaborate with each other on multiple platforms, including the mobile platform. This paper sets to outline the service-oriented architecture of WICS and presents its unique functionalities and benefits in the on-the-go collaboration on the mobile platform.