Mobile Intelligence

12.1 INTRODUCTION

Analysis of data is a complex process that often involves remote resources (computers, software, databases, files, etc.) and people (analysts, professionals, end users). Recently, distributed data mining techniques are used to analyze dispersed data sets. An advancement in this research area comes from the use of mobile computing technology for supporting new data analysis techniques and new ways to discover knowledge from every place in which people operate.

The availability of client programs on mobile devices that can invoke the remote execution of data mining tasks and show the mining results is a significant added value for nomadic users and organizations that need to perform the analysis of data stored in repositories far away from the site where users are working, allowing them to generate knowledge regardless of their physical location.

This chapter discusses pervasive data mining of databases from mobile devices through the use of Web services. By implementing mobile Web services, we allow remote users to execute data mining tasks from a mobile phone or a personal digital assistant (PDA) and receive on those devices the results of a data analysis task. A prototype based on a J2ME client will be presented, by describing the data selection task, the server invocation mechanisms, and the result presentation on a mobile device.

The chapter is organized as follows. Section 12.2 introduces mobile data mining. Section 12.3 discusses the use of Web services in ...