On the Future of Mobile Phones as the Heart of Community-Built Databases - Community-Built Databases: Research and Development - page 278

controlled and synchronized with all the desired services. Obviously, then it
would be a good idea to host that information in our personal mobile phones and
allow external websites or social networks access to that information in a more
controlled way.
l Host contact information such as personal contacts or professional contacts. Our
mobile phone is used to store data from our contacts, our relatives, and our work
connections. We add new contacts to the mobile phone when we meet them and
update their information in our mobile phone as it changes. But when we sign
into a new social network, we have to add our contacts manually or from our
e-mail accounts (typically from GMail/Yahoo/Hotmail accounts, and not from
other e-mail providers like our company's), which usually makes no sense as we
already have most of our contacts on our mobile phones.
l Pictures taken with our mobile phone. When we take a picture with our mobile
phone, we can upload it to social networks such as Flickr 5 using our mobile phone
as a client to upload the pictures to our online pictures database. This is very useful
for sharing photos from our vacations or special events, but works in a strange way,
since using the mobile phone as a client reflects that the important database is the
one that is being stored online. Why cannot the really important database, the photo
albums, be stored on our mobile phones? Why cannot we establish the access
restrictions to those photos directly from the phone instead of doing it online?

In the situations previously discussed, our important data could be more con-
trolled if the mobile phone was used as the database host, allowing certain applica-
tions/users to access that data. One of the possible problems when doing that is
managing access restrictions, but it has already been solved in the Eeb applications/
social networks area with technologies such as OAuth 6 [ 28 ], which can be adapted
for use with mobile hosts. As each mobile phone has a unique phone number
associated with it, it provides a direct route to accessing the data from everywhere.
To avoid connectivity issues, it could be useful to use actual mobile databases
technologies developed for mobile client-fixed host applications. In such applica-
tions, it is common to store a copy of certain data in the mobile phone in order to
make it available to the user if there is no connection available at that moment [ 53 ].
But in this case, the fixed host (social networks or websites hosted in a fixed server)
will be the one hosting a local copy of certain data.

11.5.2.2 P2P Mobile Databases

There exist several situations where mobile phones should not act like a host or a
client, but as peers. Probably, the most common scenario is represented by real
mobile social networks [ 8 , 47 ], where mobile applications are not merely clients for
an online social network, but make extensive use of the mobile features. Mobile

5

http://www.flickr.com
6 http://oauth.net/