Distributed RESTful Web Services for Mobile Person-to-Person Collaboration

The mobile devices have a key role in aggregating information while people are on the go. Therefore it would be beneficial to use that potential also for sharing information collaboratively. In this paper, one possible solution to this challenge is given. The proposed approach is to use distributed, lightweight Web services for mobile collaboration. The collaboration between the people is direct without the need for centralized information storage. Therefore the approach is described here as mobile person-to-person collaboration. In this paper this concept is described by providing a list of requirements and by presenting an architectural approach. To evaluate the approach, a prototype service was implemented as a case study. To discuss the focus and contribution of this work the architecture is evaluated against the requirements and compared with the relevant state-of-the-art studies in the field. The results indicate that this approach provides a prominent and novel way of leveraging on the existing content for collaboration in a mobile environment as well as refines the requirements for future mobile collaborative applications and services.