The Infocomm Development Authority (IDA) of Singapore was formed on 1 December 1999, resulting from the merger of the National Computer Board and the Telecommunication Authority of Singapore.
The merger constitutes direct recognition of the swift, sweeping convergence of information, telecommunications and media technologies. IDA has been charged with developing, promoting, and regulating info-communications in Singapore, as the catalyst for change and growth in our country's evolution into a vibrant global info-communications technology (ICT) centre.
Broadband wireless services have been identified as one of key engines of growth as we chart the path forward for continued ICT development.
Besides current work in such areas as wireless application protocol (WAP) promotion and the support of related companies, IDA is also overseeing a joint trial involving various research institutes, telecom operators, hardware manufacturers and service developers. Borne out of the OnTheMove project, this new Mobile Application Service Environment (MASE) initiative features, as its core functionalities, location management, profile management and QoS adaptation. MASE members include the Centre for Wireless Communications, the National University of Singapore, Nanyang Technological University and Kent Ridge Digital Labs. Participation in the development trial is currently being sought from key telecom operators and service providers in Singapore.
As overseer of MASE, IDA's interest in this Workshop would be to ensure that the MASE work on location management is aligned with the standards-setting effort of the W3C and the WAP Forum.
Through our participation in this Workshop, IDA hopes to find out about similar efforts that are occurring elsewhere in the world, and to share our initial plans in return. We also anticipate the networking will carry benefits in the form of future partnerships, involving not only/necessarily IDA but (also) any relevant players from Singapore.
We expect a key final output of the Workshop would be a set of foundations for standards-setting in such areas as data (and metadata) formats for position relevant data and the query/response protocols.
As the MASE working group is in the midst of planning our specifications and testbed design, we hope to factor in relevant and suitable outputs from the Workhop, and to eventually test these components as part of the trial.
We are very keen to work with other members of the Workshop on the system design and interoperability aspects as well. Providing a testbed here in Singapore (through MASE), for the purposes of the interoperability work of this Workshop, would definitely be in our considerations.