Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
Location Based Services are information services accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of the location of the mobile device. While there certainly isn’t a shortage of Internet based applications that provide Location Based Services, problems such as bad connectivity, high Internet access costs and technological impairments keep those applications from running properly. Moreover, internet connectivity is not yet ubiquitous. Besides that, systems that have off-line functionality use closed and proprietary formats to convey data to the end user, denying him the chance to produce his own content.
The focus of this project was to provide user generated localized content to a user without the need for the user to be online. In order to achieve this goal, a cache of the content is stored in the user’s mobile device, and kept up to date using a web application with a central repository. To prove the validity of this concept, a prototype regarding a mobile application for the Android Operating System and a central repository that also acts as a content generation platform for this project was fully implemented.
Author: Pedro Coelho
Type: MSc thesis
Work done at: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Year: 2010