Because of the growing mobile application device market and the military’s interest in utilizing mobile devices, ISS has taken another industry-leading step; exploiting the medium. Mobile applications require certain considerations and offer certain advantages. Taking standard applications and web content and refactoring them appropriately for a mobile form factor doesn’t result in an acceptable user experience. Mobile military application developers must adjust to the realities of variable bandwidth and intermittent connectivity in some cases, but they can also take advantage of the context inherently available from mobile devices. This context can include GPS location updates, accelerometers, compasses, cameras, microphones, etc.
ISS has noted the challenges outlined above and exploited the inherent advantages within a mobile environment by prototyping a mobile application environment we dub Motus™. Motus is the marriage of a superb mobile experience with the power of the WebTAS data access backend and customer-developed middleware, designed for optimized data transfer over very austere communications channels. Combining these technologies, ISS can deliver effective, efficient data access, along with a highly responsive and contextually relevant mobile application user experience.
Mobile Applications Become a Peer Within the WebTAS Data Ecosystem
Motus enables mobile users to achieve bi-directional communications with the federated data environment made available by WebTAS instances. This allows individual organizations to rapidly, and securely, expose data to mobile devices. Using industry standard RESTful communication standards, users can introduce queries into the WebTAS backend with a simple call in a non-proprietary query language. The resulting data returned can be formatted automatically on the server side, via a simple flag passed in the query, into a variety of formats including XML, the lightweight JSON format, Ruby and others.
In order to demonstrate the value of this approach, ISS has developed prototype applications and instances of our data infrastructure. Motus provides our government customers with a clear, unambiguous path to meeting their mobile application needs.
Prototype Motus Data Access Applications Running on the Google Android OS
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