description |
With the increasing popularity of mobile computing devices, the need
to access information in mobile environments has also grown rapidly.
In order to support such mobile information accesses, location-based
services and mobile information systems often rely on location-aware
data management mechanisms like location-aware caching, data
dissemination or prefetching. As we explain in this paper, the
location-awareness of such mechanisms is only useful, if the
accessed information is location-dependent, i.e. if the probability
with that a certain information object is accessed depends on the
users location. Although the location-dependency of the accessed
information is crucial for the efficiency of location-aware data
management mechanisms and the benefit they can get out of their
location-awareness, no metric to measure the location-dependency of
information has been proposed so far. In this paper, we describe
such a metric together with a second one for a further important
characteristic of mobile information accesses, the so-called focus.
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