Enabling Web-based location-dependent information services in mobile environments

Mobile location-dependent information services (LDISs) have drawn a lot of attention from wireless data industries in the past few years. In these services, information provided to mobile users reflects their current geographical locations. To build an LDIS system, however, there are a number of challenges: constrains of a mobile computing environment, heterogeneity in systems used by different content providers, and performance issues due to the organization of data servers. To meet these challenges, this paper proposes a distributed client/agent/server model for Web-based LDISs based on the CORBA architecture. A prototype system is implemented to demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed model.