[CeBIT] Project MIDMAY: Mobile Information Distribution Management and Access for You

It was not easy to find REAL innovation at CeBIT - most of it was tucked away in a pavillion called FuturePARC. There, Fraunhofer booths really stood out. Fraunhofer is a leading German research institute known for its invention of the MP3 format. One project in particular caught my attention with its colourful mindmaps. MIDMAY turned out to be an extremely interesting venture, aimed at connecting various bits and pieces of personal information, securing it and delivering it to any platform (mobile included). Here's how it works.

At the heart of the application lies something called the Homebase. Homebase is a module that connects distributed data repositories, such as emails, calendar entries and documents. It is capable of some smart datamining techniques. For instance, if one of your emails is titled "Meeting in Berlin", it will scan people that were cc'd on that email and "make a note" of their presence. Next time you enter "Berlin" as a search term, it will not only bring up whatever is relevant to that meeting, but also look through objects associated with other attendees. By building these links, Homebase mimics the way humans make associations instead of trying results based on pure filesystem, file or web searches.

The front-end is powered by the Unified Representation System (URM) that affects the way Homebase makes its information available based on the type of terminal it's being accessed from. It is my understanding that it would present the system differently when accessed from a desktop browser and a cell phone, for instance. This is very important for applications that are used in the mobile context and Fraunhofer recognizes that fully. Moreover, URM allows one to remotely control all data repositories - for example, one is able to forward emails from a mobile without downloading them first.

When so much information from all over is linked together, security is paramount. Fraunhofer has a separate devision working on it and even though we're not cryptology experts it looks like they've got everything in order (we were shown an interesting way for two people to exchange their security keys over bluetooth). They even claim that minimum security risks if a handset is lost, which is further improved by the fact that most of the information will be stored remotely.

MIDMAY is a very promising way to link different information together. As we get overpowered with pictures, emails and music computers should step in to organize the information in ways meaningful to the owner. Several years down the road we expect this technology to start to appear in our mobiles so we can forget about searching once and for all and starting getting instant answers instead!

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