On the Future of Mobile Phones as the Heart of Community-Built Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 262

Ten years ago, we could 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. On the one hand, current mobile
devices are more used to acquiring information from the Web due to the actual
limitations of the devices and software, which position the users in a pre-Web 2.0
era. On the other hand, mobile devices play a significant role in our daily life and will
gain prominence in future years.
In this paper, we examine the possible future of mobile devices as the heart of
community-built databases. Both the current and future characteristics of mobile
devices will allow them to play 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 the relevant data they are contributing to those
databases. The current state-of-the-art mobile devices related to community-driven
databases focus on the interface level, with a lot actual of work on augmented reality
that enhances the real world with information extracted from these databases. But
mobile devices will have a key position in the database itself. In many community-
driven databases, users contribute with contents created by themselves or even with
personal information. This is the case with communities such as Flickr, where
photographers share their photographs, or even LinkedIn, where users share their
CVs and their professional experiences. Given the current state of technology
development, users have no other options other than to upload their contributions
to a common database managed by third parties. But it may be possible in the near
future to create distributed databases where certain parts of the information, or even
the whole database, remain on mobile devices. In that way, users would have a
stronger control of their most important information and contents.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows. First, we analyze the mobile phone
industry, which has become one of the most important industries. In Sect. 11.3 ,we
analyze how mobile phones have changed our culture and explore the links between
mobile phones and everyday life. In Sect. 11.4 , the anatomy of a mobile phone is
reviewed, analyzing the most common services offered by a mobile phone, their
technical capacities, and components. Section 11.5 analyzes the actual role of
mobile phones in community-built databases and some future directions not only
from the perspective of mobile phones used as an interface to access or contribute
community-built databases, but also as its core components being the hosts of
certain relevant data. Section 11.6 presents two scenarios where the actual use of
mobile phones can be improved in community-built databases, and Sect. 11.7
concludes the paper.