Design of field wrappers for mobile field data collection Peisheng Zhao, Sarah Nusser, and Leslie Miller   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Location-based services and mobile computing: data models Abstract In mobile field data collection, data gatherer requires to get geospatial information service to support in navigating to the right locations, describing context of observed object and providing thematic information for sampling or analysis. The framework how to get this information is subject to the variation in users with different levels of knowledge about information services, applications with different need of information, and limitations of field computing environments. In this paper, we present a new concept--field wrapper, which is an extension of wrapper concepts to the field data collection environments as a means of isolating the heterogeneity of field users, applications, and computing environments from infrastructure functions. The goal of our approach of field wrapper, which is as an important part of the mediator-based framework for collecting and using geospatial data in the field, is to enable any device with any user in the field to readily and easily interact with a larger computing infrastructure to search, retrieve, and get geospatial and other kinds of data. The key idea is to characterize the field environments to get an abstract field view. From this view, the system generates a field wrapper that facilitates query translation from user general request to the precise syntax statement accepted by mediator and result translation from native result to the specific result accepted by field user. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery