Mobile information exchange and integration: From query to application layer

Due to the popularity of mobile devices, more and more commercial applications have been developed on these devices. While commercial applications are mostly backed by relational database systems, numer-ous database engines have been ported to or built on these devices, for example, SQLite. Since connec-tivity can be unstable or slow, applications such as iAnywhere have considered offline operations while data can be synchronized with the database server whenever the devices are online. On the other hand, while Web-based and XML content are very common these days, unfortunately, these mobile versions of database engines failed to fully support them. This paper considers a translation-based method with a decentralised versioning system in place to support offline operations. Web and XML contents are stored and versioned in a distributed manner and can be synchronized with each other without connecting to a server. The schema of these data can be auto-matically generated on device. With these schema, a translation engine which allows querying these data using SQL by translating the query to a correspond-ing XML query is facilitated. We believe this frame-work support mobile data applications on XML or Web data in a seamless manner. Finally, an initial prototype has been implemented and described in this paper.