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Mobile information systems : infrastructure and design for adaptivity and flexibility
Pernici B., Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., Secaucus, NJ, 2006. 354 pp. Type: Book (9783540310068)
Date Reviewed: Oct 20 2006

A quote from the famous opera Rigoletto opens this book. Translated from Italian, the quote compares mobility to a feather in the wind. Although the opera was written over 150 years ago, this quote works very well to reflect the nature of mobile systems, which appear to be the focus of this book. The fact that this quote is from an Italian opera underscores the fact that this book is a collection of papers related to, and describing, a major research project funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University, and Research from 2002 to 2006. As a part of this larger project, the Multichannel Adaptive Information Systems (MAIS) project was developed. Despite a broad title that implies this book covers a wide range of systems, the book is dedicated exclusively to the MAIS project. The editor of the book did not help readers by not mentioning explicitly on the cover that this book is focused on one specific project, a fact that is also not obvious from the table of contents, though the preface states that the book is indeed focused on the MAIS project. The authors of the many papers collected in this book, however, must be credited with generally good coverage of the research material supporting the subjects that are the focus of their respective works.

The book is organized into three parts. The first part, “Core Technologies for Mobile Information Systems,” begins with an introduction to the basic concepts of mobile systems, such as multimodal access and context awareness, service-oriented architectures, and cooperative mobile information systems. MAIS is introduced as “a conceptual framework, a platform, and a set of design support tools to take advantage of ubiquitous and context-aware access to information and services, and to provide flexible support for user interaction with the information system.” The book then quickly introduces the reader to the framework of the MAIS architecture, including its front-end and back-end environments, as well as various functional models that describe different aspects of the framework. Unified modeling language (UML) diagrams are extensively used to illustrate the structure of various models. A lot of space is dedicated to a discussion of MAIS middleware.

The second part, “Enabling Technologies,” may be the most interesting for a general reader, since it contains a good survey of a number of research projects, commercial applications, and industry standards. Most of the topics are viewed in the context of the MAIS framework, but this information is usually confined to small and well-isolated subsections, which can be easily skipped by a reader who is interested in the survey itself. This section of the book discusses the topics of adaptive networks and data management in mobile information systems, and presents an overview of low-power hardware architectures for mobile devices.

The third part, “Design of Mobile Information Systems,” contains a number of case studies. This part of the book begins with a survey of different approaches to the development of adaptive and context-aware applications. This is followed by several chapters presenting various applications developed within the MAIS framework. These include a recommender and a multimodal learning application.

This book is an excellent source of information about a large research project, which resulted in the design and development of the MAIS framework. However, the book advertises itself through its title and its table of contents as a work covering a broad range of aspects of mobile information systems design; instead, it fails to go far beyond the boundaries of the aforementioned project. This book will be of significant interest to readers looking for details about the design and implementation of the MAIS project, but general readers seeking a broad treatment of the topic, as suggested by the book’s title, may be dissatisfied.

Reviewer:  Stan Kurkovsky Review #: CR133472 (0710-0947)
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