Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
on items of interest in a city; give step by step navigation to a particular
location; or report the estimated travel time to reach a store based on the
current traffi c conditions. These functionalities can be seen in Google Maps
(Google 2012), OsmAnd (OsmAnd 2012), or Foursquare (Crowley and
Selvadurai 2009). All of them offer information on the smartphone while
considering the location of the user.
GIS Functionalities Necessary for Location-Aware Systems
As aforesaid, location-aware systems must implement multiple GIS
techniques. If GIS capabilities are fully available, location-aware systems
will be much more effi cient for end-users (Virrantaus et al. 2001).
Focusing on the literature (Marble and Peuquet 1990), the features that
provide a common GIS can be summarized in four points: 1) data input
system that collects spatial data, 2) data storage system that allows a quickly
retrieval of data, 3) data analysis system that allows mathematical operations
over data, and 4) data reporting system that is capable of displaying all or
part of the data.
These features provide the following functionalities of a GIS in a
location-based application:
1. Storage and management of spatial data.
2. Tools to perform geographic operations. Tourism applications for
smartphones in a real-world scenario use GIS methods such as
proximity analysis, distance measurement and path fi nding, which is
also called routing.
3. Displaying of cartographic data to facilitate interaction with geographic
data. For instance, the application must display maps and text data
and when the user touches the screen of the smartphone, the device
must be aware of the coordinates on the map.
GIS features available in current applications
In order to achieve GIS functionalities, there are libraries that provide them
as extensions of software or spatial databases. For example, Java Topology
Suite (JTS-Topo-suite 2012) provides a suite of functions and spatial
predicates and PgRouting (PgRouting 2012) is an extension of PostgreSQL
(postgreSQL 2012) database which provides routing functionalities.
However, these libraries are designed for computers and are inappropriate
for devices with the memory and CPU features of a smartphone.
Thus, some questions arise: how can we add GIS functionalities to
current location-based applications? Since the common GIS libraries are
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