Unified Data Model for Mobile Information Services

Mobile devices are increasingly used to obtain data and information, such as browsing the web or exchanging MMS messages. Mobile devices are inherently different from conventional desktop computers in their hardware, software and network configurations. In order to present contents functionally to mobile devices, the contents need to be adapted based on the device capabilities. These capabilities need to be communicated in a systematic way from the client to the server. In this project, a data model was developed to uniformly represent device capabilities. Several existing representations were analyzed and consolidated into a unified data model, with the consideration for extensibility in the future with new device features and functionalities. Ultimately the data model can serve as a framework for mobile devices to describe their capabilities so that the server can logically extract the capabilities and adapt contents to the devices.