FOSS4G2006 Mobile GIS BOF Minutes

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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 access and operate spatial data:

What GIS components we have ready to use?

  • 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
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