Design and implementation of a mobile wiki : mobile RikWik

Abstract

Wikis are a popular collaboration technology. They support the collaborative editing of web pages through a simple mark-up language. Mobile devices are becoming ubiquitous, powerful and affordable. Thus it is advantageous for people to get the benefits of wikis in a mobile setting. However, mobile computing leads to its own challenges such as limited screen size, bandwidth, memory and battery life; they also have intermittent connectivity due to the mobility and the coverage of network. I investigate how wikis can be made mobile; that is how wiki forms of collaborative editing can be achieved through mobile devices such as PDAs and smart phones. A prototype mobile wiki has been created using .NET, which addresses these issues and enables simple collaborative working whilst on and offline through smart mobile devices. A cut down wiki runs on the mobile device. This communicates with a main central wiki to cache pages for off line use. 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. On re-connection, offline edited as well as new pages are synchronized with the main wiki server. Finally a pluggable page rendering engine enables pages to be rendered in different ways to suit different sized screens.