Concepts for Mobile Information Visualization: The MOVI-Project

Today’s world wide distributed information systems, like, e.g., the World Wide Web, enable the homogeneous, simple access to all kinds of globally distributed scientific data (images, graphics, simulation results, etc.) and services. At the same time, wireless data communication enables location independent data access from mobile computing systems. An interesting challenge is the generalization and integration of both concepts, providing mobile access to scientific and multimedia data in a unified, globally distributed repository, the “Infoverse”. The focus of the MOVI project outlined in this paper is the location independent visualization of scientific and other multimedia data accessible in the Infoverse. This scenario is met by mobile computers like laptops or palmtops, being connected via wireless networks to communication servers, as well as by mobile users accessing the Infoverse through stationary “telephone cell” computers. This paper describes first concepts of a system architecture to realize a mobile access to an Infoverse. We describe the tasks of mobile data terminals (MDT) and stationary data server (SDS), the general object model, and the system components information agent (IA), user agent (UA), and presentation server (PS).