I am interested in mobility and little "info appliances" for use in safety and security networks in schools and school systems.

My concept is to have a data collection and reporting network for safety and security information that relies on the practitioner who works with students rather than overworked and ill-trained secretaries and clerks. I can go to Kroger's; select produce; punch in codes on a scale and weigh it myself; have a label and bar code printed; stick it on the produce; take it to the check out counter; where it is scanned and the price added to my other purchases; I pay by plastic card; and I am out.

Can we have a network just as easy for collecting and reporting safety and security information? This would be a network that relies on inputs from the practitioners who work with students. They may be teachers, counselors, assistant principals whose responsibilities include discipline, etc. Digital technology could be used to capture and transmit student ids, infraction codes, incident locations, and other codified data. Open-ended fields for descriptions and explanations could be entered through hand writing recognition or voice recognition engines.

The network would provide reports and queries from the same practitioners as well as users in central office rather than having to go through data processing. The safety and security information can be linked to the school system's student data base and data processing, however, and their reporting would not be diminished.

There's a bunch of thoughts & ideas on this using the term, "nomadic computeing. See http://millennium.cs.ucla.edu/lk.html - The modest homepage of Leonard Kleinrock, the "Father of the Internet." He has a number of downloadable papers on nomadic networking. Get the one, "Vision, Issues, and Architecture for Nomadic Computing." December 1995. In IEEE Personal Communications

and http://www.informatik.gu.se/~dahlbom/work_papers/M obile_Informatics.html -- By Bo Dahlbom and Fredrik Ljungberg,Viktoria Institute (viktoria.org) and Department of Informatics, Göteborg university, Sweden. "The use of information technology (IT) is now expanding into all dimensions of society. As a consequence, informatics with its general focus on IT use will develop into many different sub-disciplines. Here we introduce one such discipline, mobile informatics, exploring services and concepts of mobile IT use. We outline the foundations of mobile informatics and give examples from ongoing research projects at the Viktoria Institute."

Then there is a piece on the "intelligence city": http://webwrite.com/cespub2.htm -- The Intelligent City And Emergency Management In The 21st Century. "The emergence of the intelligent city in the 21st century will radically transform emergency management as we know it today. Computing and telecommunications technologies, once separate and well-defined, will merge and their distinctiveness will blur. Mobile wireless and Metropolitan Area Networks (MANs) will serve as the telecommunications backbone over which municipal management information systems will synchronize and orchestrate the various functions of government agencies and departments."