Ebook: Techniques and Applications for Mobile Commerce

Mobile Commerce (M-Commerce) comprises applications and services that are accessible from Internet-enabled mobile devices. It involves new technologies, services, and business models. Whilst it is different from traditional e-Commerce it can also be considered as an extension of the same since, among other reasons, it makes e-Commerce in a modern way available to new application areas and to new customers. Mobile devices, such as phones or PDAs open the door to a great assortment of innovative applications and services. They go wherever you go, enable users to access the Internet at any moment under any circumstances, allowing access to several different services should they be necessary (e.g. looking for a nearby restaurant or gas station while walking down the street with friends and family). These emerging situations also imply avant-garde engineering requirements, as well as fresh development tools and methodologies.

The Internet has become an essential component in all aspects of everyday life regardless of location, the time of the day or environment. Along the same lines, even today, mobile phones and PDAs have become an indispensable part of daily routine as sources of all kinds of information and services and, especially, as a permanently available interface to our surroundings. Under this scenario, the number of mobile services available is constantly increasing and evolving towards manageable and practical applications. Tomorrow, they may very well turn into intelligent assistants capable of anticipating many of our wishes and needs; but, for all these changes to happen, key issues of interoperability, usability, security and privacy still need to be addressed under the special scope of mobile services and commerce.

This book comprises the papers presented at TAMoCo 2009. It covers such diverse areas of mobile commerce as context-aware mobile applications, Web services for mobile applications, mobile technologies in urban systems, mobile technologies for education, and autonomic computing and mobile commerce.

Acknowledgements

The organizers would like to express their gratitude to the authors for submitting their work to TAMoCo 2009 and to the program committee for providing such useful evaluations of the submitted papers. We would also like to thank the invited speakers and all the participants for their presentations and further discussion. We would especially like to thank all those people who collaborated in the event organization. Finally, we also want to thank IOS Press for their understanding and their valuable support in producing these proceedings.

TAMoCo 2009 Editors

Juan Enrique Agudo (University of Extremadura, Spain)

Cherif Branki (University of the West of Scotland, UK)

Brian Cross (University of the West of Scotland, UK)

Gregorio Díaz (University of Castilla La Mancha, Spain)

Frank-Dieter Dorloff (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Guadalupe Ortiz (University of Extremadura, Spain)

Key Pousttchi (Universität Augsburg, Germany)

Martin Randles (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)

Mercedes Rico (University of Extremadura, Spain)

Héctor Sánchez (University of Extremadura, Spain)

A. Taleb-Bendiab (Liverpool John Moores University, UK)

Frank Teuteberg (University of Osnabrück, Germany)

Rainer Unland (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany)

Mobile devices offer integrated functionality to browse, phone, play music, and watch video. Moreover, these devices have sufficient memory and processing power to run (small) applications based on for instance Google Android and the iPhone/iPod OS. As such, they support for instance Google Earth to visualize your (urban) environment with all functionality offered by Google. User interaction for spatial design can thus become one of the functionalities. It allows a user to view a design with a mobile device on the location where that design is going to be realized, and communicate with other users utilizing various technologies (speech, Twitter, blogs, mail). Spatial design, especially in existing Urban Areas is complex and involves many stakeholders, each with their own interests and view on spatial design. In densely populated areas, many different aspects play a role, such as mobility, noise, air quality, safety and esthetics. The modeled response of (future) inhabitants to the quality of the (future) urban environment is becoming more and more important in the planning process. Interoperability between various devices and applications is a prerequisite for all users and all devices. Semantic is one aspect of interoperability that allows all applications to automatically process and visualize data. Semantic interoperability is also required for integration of computational algorithms to produce for instance noise maps, air quality maps as well as indicators on accessibility and transparency to stakeholders via various devices needs to be supported. The same semantics can not only be used to visualize the future, but also the past and changes in the past (timeline). It allows tourists to see a city in the past using mobile devices. This paper presents a way forward for development of integrated, device independent, collaborative spatial design systems.

Using mobile systems in urban systems is a research subject, which was addressed in the last year by several research projects and research papers. Thus, the research field of mobile systems in urban systems becomes more complex and more diversified. In such a situation an analyzing look at the research work done so far can provide valuable insights. Hence, in this paper a work in progress for a review of literature regarding the design, use and impact of mobile systems in urban systems will be presented. In this review a verbal approach will be used, which will be based on a reference framework. This reference framework will be mainly designed with respect to the research methods and research questions applied respectively discussed in the evaluated literature, so that in the end of the review conclusions regarding future research questions in the field of mobile and urban systems can be drawn.

In addition to performing the function for which they were created, handheld devices are also provider of all kind of material through its integrated internet connectivity, enabling users to access and play multimedia information (pictures, videos, music, podcast, etc.), read news on screen, and complete educational activities. Regarding its role of learning facilitator, the challenge is to ensure that mobile devices are capable of presenting content considering the features of specific users. Our proposal is consequently focused on the integration of an adaptive learning architecture into the management platform Moodle, application which is conveniently enhanced by the incorporation of mobile devices into the adaptive platform by providing mobile access to Moodle. Thus, the adaptive architecture presents the educational tasks to the client by means of interactive Flash activities which make possible both the adaptation of the educational content and the presentation of such content to handheld device capabilities.

The application of wireless technologies in urban areas is at the beginning of a transformation. While municipalities worldwide have invested in deploying wireless access infrastructures, the services which build up on these and add value for individuals and organizations are still at their early stage. Especially for European municipalities there is still a looming potential. This paper explores the current status of municipal wireless adoption in Europe based on the analysis of 25 initiatives in European metropolitan areas and derives a setup approach for wireless city initiatives which focuses on the definition and evaluation of innovative services. The approach includes overall design requirements, a generic stakeholder analysis as well as clusters for innovative wireless services and is illustrated by a case example of an ongoing wireless city project in Germany.

Mobile Commerce is composed of applications and services that are accessible from Internet-enabled mobile devices such as phones and PDAs. However, this device and location independent accessibility has brought a set of technical challenges that needs to be addressed so mobile devices users can make business and use different services in an easy and secure environment. Such challenges may include guaranteed service provision, assurance, and security. To overcome and address the latter challenges, we propose in this paper an autonomic computing based framework that serves as a complete lifecycle process for autonomic mobile commerce development. Such s framework is compliant with the Model Driven Development (MDD) approach to minimise the technology change effect and to include the domain expert in the design loop. Since a set of models is involved, one for each stage and these models are very likely to be modified in order for the system under study to evolve and respond to some events, a synchronisation mechanism should be put in place to maintain the stability and integrity characteristics. A model synchronisation framework is presented here which is based on the autonomic computing idea where the model at any stage is treated as a managed element. The model here is also seen as a service that can be queried to view some specific information and enables (via the sensing and actuation layer in this case) making required changes and modifications.

Historically, auditing has related to financial matters. It is now applied to other disciplines such as quality, environment, safety, information systems and security. Today's business climate requires organizations to constantly evolve IT strategies to respond to new opportunities or threats. Tracking the achievement of business goals, objectives and strategies is increasingly used to adapt and adjust the outcome of business processes at runtime. From the implementation perspective and particularly for mobile applications, the capability of the system to provide audit or assurance services in real time is essential if the systems are to assist the users in finding the services they need or solving the problems they have. In this paper, an Auditing/Accounting model for monitoring and observing the Intention/Process model of a business processes is introduced. With this approach, the Auditing model is able to automatically capture auditing information during the process execution time, and keep track of all the updated intentions versions in case of they are needed for re-use. The Audit model editor will assist the user to move among the updated versions of the intentions.

This paper presents an agile solution to the problems of maintaining availability in e-commerce, given the unpredictability and rapidly changing circumstances that can occur in mobile settings. A major concern is resilience to ensure an adaquate provision of resources and to provide effective load balancing techniques, which must occur in an autonomic manner. It is clear that the scale and complexity of these systems makes centralized individual assignment of jobs to specific e-commerce servers infeasible; leading to the need for an effective distributed solution. This paper investigates firstly the autonomic handling of flash crowds, predominantly occurring in mobile domains, and secondly three possible distributed solutions for load balancing: Flash crowds are monitored for at the edges of the domain, with appropriate responses provided by situation-prediction-action type constructs. The subsequent load balancing and job allocation is assessed over three distributed solutions: An approach inspired by the foraging behaviour of the Honeybee, Biased Random Sampling and Active Clustering. Together these techniques provide a high level of assurance for the mobile e-commerce functions availability to ensure adherence to customer Service Level Agreements.

This paper will discuss a design and implementation of the MAST and the mobileMAST application, a multi-agent system (MAS) for a structural optimum design application (SODA) on mobile devices. Three different versions of the MAST problem are distinguished and the approach for each one is outlined. The paper presents an investigation into the performance of the mobile client and computational results as well as performance evaluations are presented.

The advances of mobile technologies like portable handheld-computers and wireless data transmission enabled the realization of mobile workflow management systems. In such systems workflow activities can be performed using mobile devices like PDAs or smartphones. Further, the availability of locating technologies like the Global Positioning System (GPS) allows determining the spatial position of a mobile computer and stimulated the emergence of a new class of mobile application, the so called “Location-based Services”. The novel approach presented in this paper is to define location constraints for individual workflow activities when modeling a workflow schema to restrict the location where an activity can be performed. Restricting the location of activities to particular locations can help to mitigate mobility-specific usability and security issues. We introduce several types of such location constraints and suggest ways how to define them. A special focus is on “location rules” to automatically derive dynamic location constraints based on the mobile actor's current position.

In this paper we aim to find a solution to harvest as much information as possible from unstructured documents. Firstly, we discuss a swarm intelligence (SI) based idea to unstructured documents in the field of financial roadshows. The paper commences by introducing the key concepts of SI. It will then lay out a problem description and discusses a case study with a formal description. Finally it presents a solution for roadshow documents.

In this work we extend SCA models with timing restrictions to capture the behavior of systems where time determines the correctness of the implementation. Furthermore, we establish a translation from this extended model in the timed automata formal model. In this case, we have considered the timed automata formalism supported by the UPPAAL tool, due to the model-checking techniques that we can apply by using it. To illustrate the extension of the SCA model and the translation process, we have chosen a roaming service system that shows the utility of our proposal in the mobile commerce area.

The increasing demand for services for mobile customers has resulted in the need to develop services clients that could be used from mobile devices as well as from PCs, which to date has been the main focus for developers. In this paper we propose an aspect-oriented approach which allows services to be context-aware without generating any intrusive code, as well as providing the client's adaptation as a result of the particular device model characteristics and end user preferences in a completely decoupled way.

The aim of this paper is to present a new mobile decision support web service applied to improve the customer satisfaction in decision making situations related with m-commerce. The application is included as a new mobile web service under a social net framework such as web 2.0. It allows that users with the same user profile that the potential customer can act as a set of shop assistants that advices him/her according with their experiences. To facilitate the system-user interaction the service uses computing with words tools and implements an ease to use mobile interface. Therefore, users can provide their advice at anytime and anywhere by using their own mobile devices.

Organisations have more reasons than ever to consider reengineering their existing systems so that they can be accessed by heterogeneous devices, such as mobile devices or desktops. One way to accomplish this is to use a service-oriented architecture (SOA). Native language calls can be used instead of protocol based messaging to improve the performance of an SOA business process but this may affect the agility of the system. This paper introduces a study to investigate the agility/performance trade-off of using native language calls in a business process by comparing them against protocol based messaging in a system reengineering scenario.

The present paper briefly summarises my past and future research in the field of transaction processing in mobile computing. One issue of my future research deals with the peformance of our Escrow Transaction Model which represents my previous work. The applicability of the model depends on a known transaction's semantics. The possibilities to obtain the transaction's properties automatically as well as the flexible adaption of transaction management are also introduced as open issues for future research.

This paper formally defines the structural optimum design application MAST [1] and outlines the approach, for results cf [3].

Initiative games are widely used e.g. in kindergartens, assessment centers and professional manager training courses. These games traditionally involve a fictional setting and challenge; they rely heavily on the physical aspects of being set in the real world, often even in nature. Their goals and observable aspects are identified and an argument is made for the suitability of mobile device-based applications to enrich such games as well as to facilitate (in-game) evaluation. Recent and ongoing research in related fields is considered to strengthen the argument for the use of mobile devices in the field of experiential education.