Dr. Raymond Wong from National ICT Australia is talking about getting XML data onto mobile devices, which have small storage, limited bandwidth, low computation horse power, and slow response time.

Problems with traditional compression …
– applications can only operate in uncompressed mode, but in order to do the uncompression, you have to have more space to hold both the compressed and uncompressed versions.
– there isn’t enough runtime memory on mobile devices. There is extra data structure required.

The NICTA research team working on fixing this over the past 10 years, have released mContext that compresses the original document, and allows it to open within a smaller runtime footprint. They have delivered a space-efficient representation of XML data for mobile devices.

Offers full bi-directional synchronization; when people are offline on a mobile device, when they come back online, any updates will be passed back.

See mContext

Benchmark results:
– take 100MB of data … in .NET, it will grow to 329MB footprint, but with mContext on a mobile device, it will be a 67MB memory footprint. Search results will be faster on mContext.

Example:
– take the 30GB of Wikipedia (4.5 million articles in English), and compress it to 3GB for a mobile device that works perfectly and quickly.
– tradeshow catalog … taking all of the exhibitor profiles, and put it out on mobile devices.
– are also working with the education industry, for full sync for offline access when disconnected.

Raymond showed a video demo of Wikipedia running on his Samsung Windows Mobile phone. It worked great!

These were demos to show what you can do … for example for enterprise applications. They will be releasing a commercial edition of the platform in a couple of months.