Mobile GIS-based navigation guide

Abstract

Recent trends show that more Geographic Information Systems (GIS) research is targeted at developing mobile applications to be made available to end-users, instead of GIS experts. GIS can be combined with the use of Global Positioning Systems (GPS) on a mobile device, providing relevant location-based, context-aware information to end users. This research aims to design and implement a location-aware travel guide prototype for pedestrians, with the aid of mobile GIS. Unlike the traditional paper maps, the digital travel guide intends to offer a customized user interface and a location-specific travel service. Development was first done on a Desktop Computer with the essential files transferred to a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) subsequently to carry out field trials. With the aid of GPS, the device has the ability to pinpoint the location of the current user accurate to a certain tolerance. This detection is performed at specific intervals and a list of landmarks is furnished to the user through a VB script-based interactive graphical user interface (GUI). The users are able to obtain comprehensive information on buildings, in both the form of text and digital image. An indexing method built upon road segmentation was implemented to increase the search efficiency. Experimental results show that this indexing method has significant performance improvement over the exhaustive search method.