JCSE, vol. 3, no. 4, pp.216-217, 2009

DOI:

Preface for the Special Issue on Mobile and Networking Technologies for Modelling Social Applications and Services

Fernando Ferri, Patrizia Grifoni, Irina Kondratova, Arianna D'Ulizia, and Maria Chiara Caschera
National Research Council of Italy|National Research Council of Italy|National Research Council of Canada| National Research Council of Italy|National Research Council of Italy

Abstract: In the recent years researches on social, mobile and networking technologies have made rapid progresses, also considering the pervasiveness of the Internet as new platform for social interaction and stimulus of the growing demand for advanced mobile services.

Our purpose in organising this special issue was to stimulate the scientific and technological discussion among academic and industrial research groups motivating them in developing innovative models for Mobile and Networking Technologies in Social Applications and Services.

The submitted papers have been reviewed by at least three reviewers and, five papers have been accepted for the special issue according to these reviews. These papers address various issues connected with mobile devices, technologies and service delivery. The present issue will host three of the accepted papers, and the remaining two papers will appear in a forthcoming issue.

The Internet technologies on the one hand and mobile devices on the other, can make information, data and services available anywhere, anytime and in any format. Applications of mobile and networking technologies support groups of people in shared activities such as, for example, spatially dispersed groups who are collaborating on some tasks in a shared context. An important characteristic of those social applications is the continuous interaction among people using technology to achieve a common and shared purpose.

Mobile technologies play an important role in many areas of social activities, personalizing interaction and working contexts. The focus of the first paper, titled “Designing technology for visualisation of interactions on mobile devices”, is on extraction of information about the dynamics of unfolding of interactions and its visualization on mobile devices; the use of mobile technologies allows information delivering to the point of decision making in different contexts and scenarios.

Models, methods and technologies for the Mobile Communication, Mobile Web, and services are relevant discussion topics for providing the state of the research and new ideas and solutions. The second paper of this special issue, titled “The Situation Lens: A Metaphor for Personal Task Management on Mobile Devices”, addresses the discussion on managing and defining personal data, activities, tasks and services, to navigate among them according to the personal situation of the user. It proposes a data and interface model allowing users to compose personal services according to the evolution of personal situation.

Mayor research efforts, addressing methodologies, technologies and models to produce new classes of mobile applications, are devoted to enable users accessing information, data and services anywhere and anytime. However, constraints related to the wireless connection and the mobile devices limitations are critical issues for the mobile applications development. In particular, in databases applications, intentional and unintentional disconnection, as well as devices bandwidth limitations can produce the need to guarantee database consistency. The last paper of this issue, titled “3-L Model: A Model for Checking the Integrity Constraints of Mobile Databases”, discusses the problem of consistency of mobile databases, presenting the 3-L model, proposed to check their integrity constraints. One of the firstly emerged areas, closer with the mobile service delivery, is the Mcommerce, in which public and private organizations have intercepted good perspectives for their organizational, communication and business network improvement. The first paper of a forthcoming issue, titled “A Framework for Investigating Mobile Web Success in the Context of E-commerce: An Analytic Network Process Approach”, describes a framework to investigate mobile web success factors in the context of e-commerce, and an approach to find out the relative importance of these factors. This work provides a further proof that the Web and mobile technologies have produced the shifting from the information and data oriented to the resource-oriented perspective considering data, information and services as resources.

The attention to the user perspective can also be found in the second paper of a forthcoming issue, titled “User-centered Design of m-Learning System: Moodle on the Go”. In particular, this paper discusses and demonstrates the importance of the user as a central ele

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