Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 2:
Processing of pen data in the NavAD system
To demonstrate possible applications for this technology two test scenarios
shall be investigated. They are tourist maps and maps for mobile data cap-
tion. The reason for the tourism scenario lies in the assumption that paper
is still the main medium used by tourists when visiting a foreign city (Norrie
and Signer 2005). Further, electronic devices don't do justice to the way
tourists interact with maps: They often travel in groups with a high degree
of interaction and cooperative planning within the group. This social inter-
action is an integral part of the positive experience. Collaboration
around a smartphone or PDA with a small display that cannot be read from
all angles is cumbersome compared to a paper map (Brown and Chalmers
2003, Norrie and Signer 2005). Some contestants in Reilly et al. (2006)
state they prefer paper maps while travelling and use electronic maps
rather for travel prearrangements.
The mobile data caption scenario shall investigate how the described tech-
nology can be integrated in existing work flows, e.g. the data capture in
road maintenance. In this case mobile workforce detects and records road
damages that need to be entered into a digital system to be managed. This
capturing process is often still done with pen and paper (Ahtinen et al.
2007) requiring further efforts for post processing. This can mean the
scanning of forms and sketches on paper resulting in a homogeneous digi-
tal file that makes it difficult to distinguish between old and new content.
The introduction of Anoto technology can simplify this post processing
workflow by making the scanning obsolete and delivering new data inputs
as a separate layer of data to the system.
