Community-based Mobile LBS in the Philippines
This topic has probably emerged numerous times in the past already. However, most LBS activities here in this country are closed and no publicly available GPS-correct softmaps are available for use. There are a number of possible uses for a Community-based Mobile LBS system. Here are a few:
- Emergency and disaster recovery efforts can be aided with the use fo this information. Such as finding the closest primary care facility, fire department, police department, evacuation center, communications and others. This can aid people by pointing them to closest available facility.
- Critical resource tracking. Cities can use this to track critical resources like garbage trucks, watering crew and prunning crews. Imagine being able to bring you garbage out just as a garbage truck passes by. This way a homemaker can avoid the unsightly scene of garbage in your front gate. Or knowing schedule of the next pass by the plant watering crew to be able to donate some water.
- Community-based annotation for more comprehensive information. This can help tourist find the nearest Tahitian restaurant or Moroccan-themed hotel. Most commercial system will have the common locations such as hotels and some popular restaurants. However, they will not be able to store more specialized locations.
I would really like have projects like this one where the project proponent is looking for volunteers to annotate his maps. This guy from the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne plans to use the STAMPS application. Another project is John Geraci’s NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program thesis called FoundCity. This way their maps become richer with localized content than the publicly available ones via Google, Yahoo and MSN.
So what do we need for this project?
- Access to Softmaps. This is one of the hardest things to get in this country. Most vendors are not willing to share their maps without a tight non-disclosure agreement or exclusivity. This makes it hard to start a community project. But, then again, I could be wrong.
- Software tools. Since, I can’t find the sources or binaries for STAMPS. We might be forced to write one from scratch using some API like Java GIS.
- Volunteers. This is the most important component of this project. It is very costly to rely on dedicated hired crews to annotate the maps and the same time write applications for them. Since, this is primarily a community-based effort, volunteers are critical to its operation.
The key component is still the local softmaps. Once this piece of information is available, I believe there would be people who would like to write applications and enhance the data provided.
