Earth date, August 11, 1997 "Beam me up Scottie!" "We cannot do it! This is not Star Trek's Enterprise. This is early years Earth." True, this is not yet the era of Star Trek, we cannot beam captain James T. Kirk or captain Jean Luc Pickard or an apple or anything else anywhere. What we can do though is beam information about Kirk or Pickard or an apple or an insurance agent. We can beam a record of a patient, the status of an engine, a weather report. We can beam this information anywhere, to mobile workers, to field engineers, to a track loading apples, to ships crossing the Oceans, to web surfers. We have reached a point where the promise of information access anywhere and anytime is close to realization. The enabling technology, wireless networks, exists; what remains to be achieved is providing the infrastructure and the software to support the promise. Universal access and management of information has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of computer technology. Central computing gave the ability to perform large and complex computations and advanced information manipulation. Advances in networking connected computers together and led to distributed computing. Web technology and the Internet went even further to provide hyper-linked information access and global computing. However, restricting access stations to physical location limits the boundary of the vision.

Universal access and management of information has been one of the driving forces in the evolution of computer technology. Central computing gave the ability to perform large and complex computations and advanced information manipulation. Advances in networking connected computers together and led to distributed computing. Web technology and the Internet went even further to provide hyper-linked information access and global computing. However, restricting access stations to physical locations limits the boundary of the vision. The real global network can be achieved only via the ability to compute and access information from anywhere and anytime. This is the fundamental wish that motivates mobile computing. This evolution is the cumulative result of both hardware and software advances at various levels motivated by tangible application needs. Infrastructure research on communications and networking is essential for realizing wireless systems.Equally important is the design and implementation of data management applications for these systems, a task directly affected by the characteristics of the wireless medium and the resulting mobility of data resources and computation. Although a relatively new area, mobile data management has provoked a proliferation of research efforts motivated both by a great market potential and by many challenging research problems. The focus of Data Management for Mobile Computing is on the impact of mobile computing on data management beyond the networking level. The purpose is to provide a thorough and cohesive overview of recent advances in wireless and mobile data management. The book is written with a critical attitude. This volume probes the new issues introduced by wireless and mobile access to data and their conceptual and practical consequences. Data Management for Mobile Computing provides a single source for researchers and practitioners who want to keep abreast of the latest innovations in the field.It can also serve as a textbook for an advanced course on mobile computing or as a companion text for a variety of courses including courses on distributed systems, database management, transaction management, operating or file systems, information retrieval or dissemination, and web computing.