Ad Hoc Human Information Nets (hereafter Humint Nets), consisting of humans, mobile computing technology such as laptops and PDAs, and possibly disposable sensors, present a significant opportunity for conducting asymmetric threat surveillance. The PDA hardware is gaining in maturity, and the economies of scale are already well-established. Therefore, the ability to deploy Humint Nets on a large scale can be achieved from both economic and technological perspectives. While the economics and hardware to make Humint Nets work are both well-developed, the same cannot be said of the software on PDAs. In this proposal, we address the system software needs that must be addressed in order to make the vision of Humint Networks a realistic possibility. At the core of the proposal are four areas we will explore as part of a feasibility study: distributed micro-databases; distributed query processing and power optimization; distributed services; and managing ad hoc information with XML on small devices. To determine feasibility, some lightweight prototyping will be done in each of the four areas, toward the ultimate goal of producing a report and set of requirements for a more comprehensive product development effort. The availability of lightweight database implementations will be a major boon to application development on handhelds. Environments such as the Palm presently provide limited support for databases. The use of distributed computing techniques is in infancy on handhelds. For handheld computing to be taken seriously, intelligent network-aware software must become available, similar to the state of computing on desktop computers. The use of XML is becoming prevalent in desktop and server-side computing. Its adoption in the handheld space has been limited due to significant resource requirements. The exploration of lightweight techniques for XML processing will benefit application development across the board. We see potential to improve greatly the state of data synchronization and provide more flexible data modeling. The resounding theme of this project is the exploration of advanced computing techniques and an emphasis on lightweightness with the hope of building more powerful applications than notepads, address books, and calendars.
Keywords: Micro-Database,Hierarchical,Power Optimization,Discovery Service,Xml,Clustering,Lightweight Processing,Synchronization
