Large Multimedia Artifacts Prebuffering in Mobile Information Systems as Location Context Awareness

The proliferation of mobile computing devices and local-area wireless networks has fostered a growing interest in location-aware systems and services. We consider location as prime form of context information. The developed framework joins the concepts of location and user tracking as an extension for a new type of mobile information systems. The framework uses a WiFi network infrastructure to let a mobile device determine its indoor position. User location is used for data prebuffering and pushing information from server to user's PDA. All server data are saved as artifacts (together) with its position information in building. The accessing of prebuffered data on mobile device can highly improve response time needed to view lar.ge multimedia data.