Mobisaic: An Information System for a Mobile Wireless Computing

Mobisaic is a World Wide Web information system designed to serve users in a mobile wireless computing environment. Mobisaic extends the Web by allowing documents to both refer and react to potentially changing contextual information, such as current location in the wireless network. Mobisaic relies on client-side processing of HTML documents that support two new concepts: Dynamic Uniform Resource Locators (URL) and Active Documents. A dynamic URL is one whose results depend upon the state of the user's mobile context at the time it is resolved. An active document is one that automatically updates its contents in response to arbitrary changes in a speciied environment, such as a user's mobile context. This paper describes the design of Mobisaic, the mechanism it uses for representing a user's mobile context, and the extensions made to the syntax and function of Uniform Resource Locators and HyperText Markup Language documents to support mobility.