Going Mobile with your GIS

Mobility
What is mobile? If you can move your computer from one side of your desk to the other, it that mobile? If you can carry it down the hall to another desk, is that mobile? If you can take it with you around the world, is that mobile? Mobility is the ability to take a “system” and use it easily in the locations that people move to in their daily work. A system is not mobile if it cannot be used in a vehicle or in an adjacent building or from home. Mobility is about productive use of a system – not the mere fact that it can physically be moved from place to place. After all, a rock is mobile – well, a small rock is mobile.

Types of Mobility

Hardly Mobile, Barely Mobile, Sort-of Mobile
Prior to personal computers, mobility was provided by mobile terminals. These terminals were mainly keyboards with thermal paper that provided the display capabilities and acoustic couplers to plug in the phone handset. Ages ago in the 1980s, personal computers were created. People started carrying these monsters around. These machines were known as portable. In today’s world, these would be considered hardly mobile. Luggable was the cute name applied to those that were privileged to have one of these machines at their disposal. The units were costly. Reliability was a problem. Processor capabilities were minimal. Computer memory was limited. Hard disk speed, size, and reliability were also problems.

Limited Mobility
Conquering the portability issues leads to the next major type of mobility – limited mobility. Limited mobility allows portions of applications to be taken mobile. Simple applications or standalone applications are what was rolled-out. System units were smaller and actually portable. Performance was improved. Disk storage was rapidly growing (larger disks for less money). GIS systems that went mobile were usually restricted by the amount of disk space and the limited processing power in mobile units. “Helper” applications and translators were built during this period to run on the larger but limited machines.
Problems that remain to be solved:

disk storage
data translation to “helper” applications
making limited applications update-capable
communication for replications and updates

Full Mobility
Miniaturization and chip advancements leads to the current state of mobility – full mobility. Today, mobile processors are available to take the full GIS mobile – including supporting applications. The mobile processors are light, fast, and durable. These mobile platforms plug-in at the office and can operate as main workstations. Other smaller mobile platforms are now available that run versions of applications that are similar to GIS application but are not fully functional GIS.

Problems that remain to be solved:

disk storage
communications
data replication
data replication management
license management