On the Future of Mobile Phones as the Heart of Community-Built Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 261

Chapter 11
On the Future of Mobile Phones as the Heart
of Community-Built Databases

Jose C. Cortizo, Luis I. Diaz, Francisco M. Carrero, Adrian Yanes,
and Borja Monsalve

Abstract In retrospect, 10 years ago, we would not have imagined ourselves
uploading or consuming high-quality videos via the Web, contributing to an online
encyclopedia written by millions of users around the world or instantly sharing
information with our friends and colleagues using an online platform that allows us
to manage our contacts. And the Web is still evolving and what seemed to be
science fiction then would become reality within 5-10 years. Nowadays, the Mobile
Web concept is still an immature prototype of what will be in a few years' time, but
it represents a giant industry (it is expected that some five billion people will be
using mobile/cellular phones in 2010) with even greater possibilities in the future.
In this paper, we examine the possible future of mobile devices as the heart of
community-built databases. The mobile devices characteristics, as both current and
future features, will allow them to have a very relevant role not only as interfaces to
community-driven databases, but also as platforms where applications using data
from community-driven databases will be running, or even as distributed databases
where users can have better control of relevant data they are contributing to those
databases.

11.1 Introduction

The Social Web [ 19 ] has been able to shift the way information is generated and
consumed. Initially, information was generated by one person and consumed by
many people, but now the information is generated by many people and consumed
by many people, changing the needs in information access and management [ 18 ].