Models & Tools for Pervasive Applications focusing on Territory Discovery – MOANO

Mobile peripherals are invading everyday more our lifes. Pervasive applications that can be downloaded into those peripherals (with App Store or Google Store) allow assisting everyday tasks of mobile users.
Mobile users naturally query map services before moving. They used to download applications and to configure them. They also download data that they predict to use as they are on a given geographic territory. Those with computer science skills know how to use Android Frameworks and/or Google Maps in order to make available before moving (and eventually to publish on website like Android Market), the applications according to their needs.
In this project, we are interested in useful applications to complete/increase the discovery of a territory. Such applications generally include a mapping component (visualization and spatial annotations, base maps are often locally stored as rectangular zones), a textual component (visualization and annotations of documents linked to the spatial position of the user), components allowing to acquire useful resources (GPS data, pictures, videos, short texts, etc.), communication components in order to exchange with database servers (emission/reception of pictures or more generally of multimedia documents) and other more specific components needed by the user to realize his job.

While moving in a territory, mobile users often encounter problems with their handheld computers/mobiles. Some locally stored data become useless or unnecessary whereas other data is not included in the handheld computer. Some software components, part of the whole applications can become useless to process some information or documents that the user did no predict to manage during his mission.

In order to answer such difficulties, our project has three operational objectives:
a. To enlarge the communication scale. Communications are not only between the mobile user and a central server, but can be established with other mobile users in his close environment (hiker, scientific responsible, etc.) that can be joined with wireless solutions. Such environment can help to find/provide missing data/software or can host part of the needed process.
b. To provide people without computer-science skills with a toolset enabling them produce / configure mapping applications that will be hosted on their mobile phone. The aim is to enable a user to assemble/reorganize a mapping application from components and documents that he has and/or he could reach/get in his close environment. If such assembling/aggregation can seem difficult to reach on Smartphones but we believe that users of Notebooks have enough physical power (Screen, CPU, Ram, Bandwidth and Battery) to reach this objective.
c. To process all the documents of interest in order to make their spatial and thematic semantics available to mobile users. Thus, while moving on a territory, they will be able to query such documents (locally or in their environment) according to spatial and thematic criterions.

These operational objectives raise many technical difficulties as well as scientific locks structuring our project.