Integration for Location - Aware Computing

As a result of the progress in mobile computing, people can access various kinds of local information on the Internet for use in daily life. However, such contents and services are heterogeneous and distributed. There is thus a need for a mobile-computing methodology and services for utilizing local information from the Internet. In this paper we introduce a research project entitled Mobile Info Search (MIS), and describe its goal, architecture, implementation, and experimental results. The goal of MIS is to collect, structure, and integrate distributed and diverse local information from the Internet in a practicable form and make it available through a simple interface to mobile users in various situations or contexts. We do this in a location-oriented way. The experimental MIS application features a \location-oriented meta search" for Web database servers, a \location-oriented robot-based search" called kokono Search for distributed Web documents, and a simple interface based on the latitude and longitude of the user's location , which are obtained from the user's PHS or GPS. Analysis of a trial service shows that multiple services, such as maps and textual information, are often requested together for one location within a short period of time. This shows our method works well enough to provide simple information integration, and that the MIS concept was welcomed.