30th Anniversary SOFSEM 2004        

Abstract:
Information is necessary to perceive the dynamic world and information processing is necessary to be in sync with. The dynamic state of the world is managed by the laws of the nature, which we cannot alter or mess around with. The only way to maintain our lives in this dynamic environment is to synchronize our activities with its activities. We achieve this through information management, a discipline which defines a paradigm, which can be referred to as Pull-Process-Push. Under this paradigm we perceive (pull) information with necessary resources, process them under some protocol and push the result back to the world.

To achieve these PPP successfully the information management discipline, initially, worked in a modular fashion with little integration. Thus, data processing, networking, telecommunication, etc., evolved in a modular fashion. For some time we accepted them as mutually exclusive and remotely complementary but as we learn more and more about them and to develop new ways to handle activities of our lives, we begin to discover how they complemented each other. This was not only out of research curiosity but also out of our necessity to be in sync with the dynamic world. Thus, in the information management discipline the integration, diffusion, and merging of web, data warehousing, business processes, mobility, networking, etc., become seamless. Now a days it is very common to hear mobile web mining, web mining, web caching, mobile database systems, mobile federated systems, and so on, and the state of the research and development in this integrated area. Now it is not acceptable to say that one is doing research in mobile web caching but is not knowledgeable in mobile discipline. Researchers as well as the research activities are integrated, diffused and merged in a seamless manner.

In this talk we discuss research problems in these areas, available solutions, and also the golden thread, which binds them in a seamless manner. We discover the multidimensional problems which require multidimensional solutions. We discuss mobility problems and recent solutions. We illustrate that conventional problems migrate without any change but conventional solutions cannot and we have to develop new solutions from scratch to handle new parameters and constraints. The talk ends with the changing trends in integration, diffusion and merging.