Pocket RikWik: A Mobile Wiki Supporting Online and Offline Collaboration

Wei-Che Huang, Master Student, School of Software Engineering & Data Communications, Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University Of Technology, Brisbane, 4000. Email: w2.huang@student.qut.edu.au

Paul Roe, Associate Professor, School of Software Engineering & Data Communications, Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University Of Technology, Email: p.roe@qut.edu.au

On Wong, Lecturer, School of Software Engineering & Data Communications, Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University Of Technology, Email: o.wong@qut.edu.au

Keywords

collaboration, wiki, mobile computing, offline, hoarding, adaptive, synchronization.

Abstract

Wikis are a popular collaboration technology. They support the collaborative editing of web pages through a simple mark-up language. The wikipedia site is perhaps the best example of how wikis can be used. There are lots of different wikis, all with their own special extended features over the basic collaborative editing of web pages. In this paper we investigate how wikis can be made mobile; that is how wiki forms of collaborative editing can be achieved through mobile devices such as smart phones. Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous and powerful. Thus it is advantageous for people to get the benefits of wikis in a mobile setting. However mobile devices present their own challenges such as limited screen size, bandwidth and battery life; they also have intermittent connectivity. We have investigated and built a prototype mobile wiki which addresses these issues and which enables collaboration through mobile devices. The system comprises a cut down wiki which runs on the mobile device. This communicated with a main central wiki to cache pages for off line use. This hoarding process also enables new pages to be created. On re-connection edited and new pages are synchronized with a main wiki server. Communication and hence hoarding is adaptive depending on the characteristics of the mobile device. When sitting in a powered cradle eager downloading and synchronization of pages is supported. During mobile operation pages are cached lazily on demand to minimize power use and to save the limited and expensive bandwidth. Finally a pluggable page rendering engine enables pages to be rendered in different ways to suit different sized screens. This enables simple collaborative working whilst on and offline through smart mobile devices. The prototype system has been implemented using .NET.