Toward an Active Database Platform for Guiding Urban Pedestrians

2002

Within our society, the demands regarding individual mobility are increasing continuously. Thus, also the amount of traffic that is produced on highways and within cities is intensified. For this reason, it will be more and more important to manage and to guide the individual traffic so that the capacity of traffic networks can be exploited more efficiently and that traffic jams are reduced. For just-in-time traffic management, information and services have to be combined in a suitable way to support the mobile users. An approach for this purpose can be delivered by the NEXUS project. It aims at the development of a generic and open platform that offers the possibility to access socalled location-based information and services. NEXUS is currently being carried out within a research group supported by the DFG (German Research Council) in cooperation between the Institute for Photogrammetry, the Institute of Parallel and Distributed High-Performance Systems and the Institute of Communication Networks and Computer Engineering of the University of Stuttgart. The central task of the project deals with data management aspects with respect to location awareness. Concerning traffic aspects, current data and navigation services can be combined within the NEXUS platform in order to improve the individual traffic management. Within this paper, the architecture of the platform as well as the basic aspects of the Augmented World Model will be described in more detail. Within this context, also the integration of different data sources within the platform and the services provided by NEXUS will be presented. Furthermore positioning techniques within NEXUS will be discussed.

igi-global.com

Recent years have seen tremendous progress in the field of developing services, devices and networks for ubiquitous information provision. The idea to utilise rich and interactive content, with devices that are always at hand and over networks that can be accessed anywhere, is becoming increasingly popular. Although this ideal cannot yet be achieved entirely due to several limitations (e.g.

IEEE Distributed Systems Online, 2000

The July-Sept. Urban Computing special issue of IEEE Pervasive Computing features 12 Works in Progress on urban computing and mobile devices, and we've posted an additional seven WiPs here. The first two entries involve projects exploring interactions between urban participants and pervasive computing environments. The next three are projects that intend to leverage location and environmental information collected from mobile sensors such as wearable sensors, mobile phones, and RFID readers. The sixth entry is a project exploring how users can authenticate themselves to pervasive computing environments, and the final entry focuses on combining navigation in urban computing and physical urban environments.

Procedia Computer Science, 2011

The rapid expansion of wireless technologies and their interactions with wired networks together with wide spread of Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) infrastructures allow today the development of location-based services (LBS). Furthermore, the evolution of service oriented infrastructures enables information sharing between applications over the network. In this paper, a distributed interactive platform, called TransportML, for LBS interaction and cooperation is presented. It is an extended XML platform based on Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) principles to recognize, to monitor, and to collect service information and description over the network. A prototype is developed, in the context of intelligent transportation systems (ITS), to allow sharing information collected by each service and then acquiring more information about the driving context. This information helps drivers making appropriate decisions and, therefore, increases and improves road safety. The prototype is tested in urban and highway areas and results are reported to show the benefit of using this platform for sharing road information as well as services interaction.

Proceedings of the 12th international conference on Human computer interaction with mobile devices and services - MobileHCI '10, 2010

We introduce activity-based navigation, which uses human activities derived from sensor data to help people navigate, in particular to retrace a -trail‖ previously taken by that person or another person. Such trails may include step counts, walking up/down stairs or taking elevators, compass directions, and photos taken along a user's path, in addition to absolute positioning (GPS and maps) when available. To explore the user experience of activity-based navigation, we built Greenfield, a mobile device interface for finding a car. We conducted a ten participant user study comparing users' ability to find cars across three different presentations of activity-based information as well as verbal instructions. Our results show that activity-based navigation can be used for car finding and suggest its promise more generally for supporting navigation tasks. We present lessons for future activity-based navigation interfaces, and motivate further work in this space, particularly in the area of robust activity inference.

Abstract—Use of location based services has been gaining popularity over the years especially with the increase in smartphone sales. The benefits include helping you find nearby places of interest like a restaurant, café, atm among others and additional information like location and distance and providing navigation assistance to these places. In most cases such services are dependent on the availability of an internet connection on the phone.