FOSS4G2006 Mobile GIS BOF Minutes
Where, When and Who?
- Place: FOSS4G 2006 conference, Lausanne, Switzerland
- Starting date: 13-Sep-2006, 18:00
- Duration: 02h00'
- Presenters:
- Mrs. REIMER, Silke
- Mr. BOWDEN, Tim
- Mr. LOSKOT, Mateusz
Mobile GIS BOF Attendees
NOTE: Please, add yourself if you're not on the list or fix your name if it's incorrectly spelled below.
- Brent Fraser
- David Villalon
- Frank Warmerdam
- Frederic Pouget
- Jan-Oliver Wagner
- Just van den Broecke
- Ludovic LESTRAT
- Mateusz Loskot
- Silke Reimer
- Till
- Tim Bowden
- Tyler Mitchell
Why you are here?
Silke: It's possible there is an opportunity to found some work on Open Source mobile solutions Contribution of project management, infrastructure, place for meetings, marketing stuff, may be founds.
Just: On-line services. Apps for mobile phones. Multimedia features. Tracking platform for mobile devices. Contribute multimedia features, Java development.
Tim: Collecting data in a field. Consume data in a field Synchronize data on mobile devices against servers. Provide building blocks, not end user application. Contribute use cases, testing and ideas.
Till: Collecting data infrastructure features in a field Identify object in a field The idea was/is to develop a client that provides data and identification tool, POI, ROI, Routing tool. The idea is to connect central database with mobile client. Contribute: experience about Java Script (->Web based) on mobile devices, ideas, testing. Looking for: well-designed and developed platform.
Brent: Data collection in a field and server upload capabilities. Use mobile device as an input device, not only for output/data provider. Good accuracy level. Collect control points to rectify satellite image. Precise navigation and locating capabilities. Mobile device -> iPAQ
Frederic: Interested in mobile solutions. Works for private sector, not Open Source company. LBS for mobile platform.
Ludovic: Works with ArcPad based solutions. Inventory of features in field. Contribute: testing
Tyler: Provide advanced features of visualization, 3D, etc. Tablet PC
??? iPod-based solution
Mateusz: Interested in development of mobile GIS framework, a set of libraries and components usable in other projects, end-user solutions. Provide foundations for mobile GIS development. GUI independent.
Project output
We can see three different applications for mobile devices: a) End-user application, a kind of viewer or editor b) Data collecting solution, with GPS, editing and automation features c) The third one, is a kind of LSB solution for mobile phones or other small devices with GPS/GSM capabilities.
a) and b) are main lines of development proposal. c) is very different application to a) and b)
Development platform
a) Langauge: - C/C++ - it seems to be our language of choice - Java - mainly used on mobile phones - Python - who has worked with Python on mobile devices?
b) Operating platform - Windows Mobile >= 5.0 - the main OS on the mobile devices market at the moment; target platform of the first prototype - Linux - most of us would prefer to develop for Linux, but it's not very popular yet, no commercial support for Linux-based mobile devices, etc.
b) Tools: - Visual Studio 2005 - a commercial toolset, the only option for Windows Mobile development :-( - gcc-based toolset for cross-compilation, but there is no debugger
Type of application
- standalone application (most of participants likes this one) - thin client (a web-based solution) - strong client (standalone application or a combination)
Data
Data sources localization we want to support:
- local
- remote
Main data types we want to support:
- vector
- raster
Various data sources and formats possible to use:
- vectors:
- local files (ie. shapefiles, mapinfo)
- GML and WFS
- database (ie. SQLite)
- rasters:
- tile server for rasters
- WMS
Available libraries to operate spatial data:
What GIS components we have ready to use?
a) Windows Mobile - OGR - PROJ.4 - SQLite
b) Linux - most of currently available portable libraries are runnable on Linux on mobiles
GPS
All Mobile GIS BOF participants agree that we need a GPS support.
Windows Mobile
- GPS API and GPS Intermediate Driver (GPSID) - see short overview
- gpsd does not officially run on Windows-based systems, what about porting it?
- There is always an option to develop our own portable library for reading and parsing NMEA sentences
from serial/... port in a separate thread (no TCP/IP server/listener required)
Linux
- gpsd works very well on Linux