Dagstuhl Seminar “Mobile Information Management” – Executive Summary

From October, 25th until 29th, 2004, a Dagstuhl seminar on mobile information management took place. The seminar was attended by 34 researchers from Europe and North America with backgrounds ranging from database systems, mobile information systems, geographic information systems and business informatics to wireless networks and security. The motivation for organizing this seminar was as follows: The combination of wireless and wired connectivity along with increasingly small and powerful mobile devices, such as laptops, personal digital assistants, handheld/tablet PCs, and smart phones, but also embedded devices and sensors, enables a wide range of new applications and new ways to use existing applications. This will radically change the way information is managed and processed today. Information becomes ubiquitous, highly distributed and at the same time accessible from everywhere at any time. Information access takes place in highly dynamic and instable networks. Nevertheless, users and application developers will expect information processing to continue under similar guarantees as those offered by todays stationary and more or less centralized systems, even if some nodes of the ubiquitous information network are (temporarily) disconnected and/or are in motion. Examples for these guarantees are the ones given by database management systems, i.e. consistency and durability of data. Additional challenges stem from the fact that mobile devices while evolving fast, are (and will always be) less powerful than their stationary counterparts; they are smaller (resulting, e.g., in smaller inand output devices and less available storage), have restricted energy supplies and communicate via expensive, unreliable wireless communication media and require new solutions to major existing security problems.