Mobilizing search of the here and now

The escalating number of digitally-accessible devices pervading our everyday environments gives rise to the availability of tremendous amounts of human- and device-generated data. This data possesses strong spatial and temporal semantics, it captures phenomena and states of the environment, and is extremely volatile, being created, moved, stored, and deleted on-demand at rapid rates. The requisite support for general-purpose expressive search of the “here” and “now” has eluded realization due to the complexities of indexing, storing, and retrieving relevant information within a vast collection of highly ephemeral data. We aim to address this gap in the research (i) through search mechanisms that are sensitive to the bearings of space and time on the relevance of search results and (ii) more fundamentally, through the design of a general-purpose data model that facilitates information availability in pervasive computing environments and exposes spatial and temporal relationships between digital data and physical phenomena. Finally, this paper outlines simulation and deployment evaluations of the proposed research.