DEVELOPMENT OF PUBLIC FACILITY AND HOUSEHOLD LOCATOR TOOL USING MOBILE GIS AND ANDROID TECHNOLOGY Engr. Alexander T. Demetillo, Engr. Michelle V. Japitana, Sonny S. Norca CLAIMS-GIS Project, College of Engineering and Information Technology, Caraga State University, Butuan City, Philippines atdemetillo@gmail.com michelle.japitana@gmail.com sonnynorca@gmail.com KEY WORDS: Location Based Services, GPS, Network Location Provider, SQLite ABSTRACT: An extensive growth and production of android application has proven the society that flexible software such as this would make a distant advancement in terms of mobile and user-friendly applications. The utilization of the android technology mainly supports the location based service module which deals with information and entertainment service accessible with mobile devices through the mobile network and utilizing the ability to make use of geographical position of the mobile device. The development of the application caters the need of the City Government of Butuan in pursuing the project of locating the households and public facilities on every barangay that belongs to its territory. The application employs the capability of the Android Technology to handle Mobile GIS Geotagging. It is developed using Java programming language with its extensible plug-ins and SQLite database as the temporary storage of data when there is no internet connection, when the connection is available data can be passed to the main server. The application acquires the coordinates of the households using the GPS and the pictures are captured using the android camera. Geotagging is the process of adding geographical information to photographs using this technology information such as the date, time and coordinates can be attached to the pictures taken during surveys. Using Google Maps and geotagging a visual representation of the household geographical information gathered will also be provided along with its corresponding picture. This will enable the users to know exactly where they are or where something is. Aside from the coordinates other elements such as the residence, names, barangays and more will be also added to make it more personalized. The aim of this study is to improve the way of conducting surveys through android technology and seize the opportunity to innovate and get things done using a mobile device. 1. INTRODUCTION According to Mantas, Liu and Pireira (2015), android is an operating system based on a Linux kernel (http://developer.android.com) that is available on smartphones and tablets of most major manufacturers. Android, a Google product, currently holds a dominant market position and is expected to consolidate that advantage in coming years (IDC, 2013). Android, being an open-source application by nature, the interest and enthusiasm of the developers and programmers was increasingly focused on using and enhancing its features. This is one area of mobile phone technology enhancement that allows developers and programmers to offer users just what they seek under their preferred area of interest (Bhosale, 2015). In this study, the utilization of the android technology in community profiling is initiated to develop a domestic and public locator tool for geotagging. Community profiling is a process wherein a specific action plan is implemented to raise awareness, identify issues, priorities and actions to be taken. Part of this profiling is the acquiring of the coordinates using an Android application installed in a mobile device. The most recent and useful Android application is regarding the use of browsers and GPS navigation system. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) is a top priority technology used for locating a device position accurately (Ananya and Venkatalakshmi, 2011). Methodology for tracking can be done using a GPS receiver which is an additional hardware integrated in most of mobile equipment. We have used GPS as the approach idea for location tracking. The platform used for development is Android Operating System and it has been proven as the best operating system for a contextaware location based services (Hassan, 2008). Location Based Services (LBS) have become a trend in the past few years and is widely used for Location-Aware application for Android. With the incorporation of GPS devices in smartphones and using cellular network towers, obtaining the user location was made possible. Although GPS is most accurate it quickly consumes battery power, and doesn't return the location as quickly as users want (Reddy, 2011). Using the assisted GPS acquiring the location is much faster. Assisted GPS works by determining user location using cell towers. Very often cellular network towers have GPS receivers (or a base station nearby) and those receivers are constantly pulling down satellite information and computing the data (http://www.windowscentral.com), this data is then passed on to the cellular
phone when requested. Satellite information such as the coordinates that are passed back to the device will be in a Geographic Information. The geographic information obtained during the survey will be attached to image captured during survey in the form of meta-data. Geotagging is the process of adding geographical information to photographs, image of the houses is captured which will serve as a reference to identify if that household belongs to the poverty threshold or not. This application uses GPS that has been integrated with the device. If the device supports assisted GPS then the device will automatically request for the satellite information from the nearest Network Location Provider. GPS accuracy may also vary, factors such as weather condition, amount of interference and horizon information: open fields are faster than canyons or urban environments where buildings can interfere with the satellite-receiver line of site. 2. MATERIALS AND METHODS 2.1 Android Platform In developing the application the researchers have used Eclipse IDE a Java-based open source platform. To be able to set up new Android project a plugin was added. Android Development Tool (ADT) was used to extend the capabilities of eclipse to create the Application User Interface, packages were added based on the Android Framework API. These API s facilitate to access the contents on the phone such as contacts and calendar information and also integrate them with external web-service in order to provide online services. Errors may occur during the development, for a complete set of debugging tools Android SDK was also integrated. 2.2 Acquire Location and Information To be able to acquire the geographic information of the households and public facilities, geotaggers must visit the area. Geographic Information such as the coordinates are acquired using the android application which is incorporated with the Location Listerner library. A Location Listener is the interface implemented to receive location updates. Instead of relying on GPS alone, assisted GPS was also implemented which acquires the location much faster (Android Location Package, 2010). Assisted GPS works by determining user location using cell towers. Very often cellular network towers have GPS receivers (or a base station nearby) and those receivers are constantly pulling down satellite information and computing the data (http://www.windowscentral.com), this data is then passed on to the cellular phone when requested. Once the location is set, additional information such as the address, name of respondent and location name will be inputted to the device. Since not all area has signals, gathered data are saved temporarily to the SQLite first as shown in Figure 1. In return, the SQLite will respond with an ID, this means that the data has been successfully saved to the phone. Temporary ID s are provided to the gathered household, if the network connection is available all the information held by the ID will be sent to the server. Then a permanent ID will be given by the server. All the coordinates gathered during the survey will be used for geotagging. In the geotagging process, images of the House acquired in the field are attached into the coordinates. Images are captured using the android camera, this integration provides a higher-end GUI application to the users. The mobile device camera is utilized to capture pictures and tag them to the location points. To access the device camera, permission had to be set in the Android Manifest file by including the <uses-permission> as CAMERA and <usesfeatures> manifest element to declare the camera features used by the application (Reddy, 2011). To provide a visual representation for the user s current location, Google Maps was utilized. Google provides a Maps external library that includes the com.google.android.maps package. The com.google.android.maps package used in this application offered built-in downloading, rendering, and caching of Maps tiles, as well as a variety of display options and controls. An additional package called Map View was added to be able to use the maps. A Map View displays a map with data obtained from the Google Maps service. When the MapView has focus, it will capture key presses and touch gestures to pan and zoom the map automatically; including handling network requests for additional maps tiles (Reddy, 2011). It also provides all of the UI elements necessary for users to control the map. To use Google Maps in the application, a Maps API key had to be obtained to register with the service and Android system had to be notified that the application wishes to implement the add-on Google APIs which are external to the base APIs.
TEMP 1615 1601224 Household Acquires Geographic Information Geotagger Store initial House hold information Server Generate SQLite Network Connectivity Available? Figure 1 Gathering of Information 2.3 Store Data The data storage options which the Android supports: Shared Preferences, Internal Storage, External Storage, SQLite Databases and Network Connection. Tree Tracker uses internal storage, External Storage and SQLite databases for storing persistent application data. By default, the application once installed is stored in the internal storage of the Android system. This is private to the application and other applications cannot access it. When the user uninstalls the application, these files get removed. Since every Android-compatible device supports a shared external storage to save files, this application uses Secure Digital (SD) card to store the images captured. External storage are open to the public and can be read by all who can access it. It can be modified by the user when connected to a computer and the mode is set to USB Mass Storage which allows transferring files. Android also provides full support to SQLite databases. All databases that are created in the application are accessible by name to any class in the application but none outside. This is implemented by creating a sub-class to SQLiteOpenHelper and overriding the oncreate() method to execute the SQLite command to create the tables in the databases. The methods getwritabledatabase and getreadabledatabase are called for write to and read from the database which return SQLiteDatabase object (SQLiteOpenHelper, 2010). The Android SDK includes a sqlite3 database tool which is required to browse the table contents, run SQL commands and perform other SQL functions. Executing an SQL query returns a Cursor which stores the result set pointing to all the rows found by the query. 3. RESULTS AND DISCUSSION Using mobile device camera the picture of the respondent and their respective house was captured and displayed for reference. The pictures were decoded to reduce the size before displayed so that the consumed phone memory can be minimized and Memory exception can be avoided. All of the text data showed in the Figure 2 are stored in the SQLite while the pictures are stored in the SD card. In this example WIFI connection was used to send the information and request for ID. The combination of numbers on the top of interface shown in Figure 2 represents the ID generated by the server while the ID generated by the phone is shown at the bottom of the picture. SD card has been chosen as the image storage to address the limit of the phones internal storage. If an SD card is provided, the capacity of the phone to store files can be extended up to 32GB which very is useful when it comes to the number of images that can be accommodated in every survey.
Figure 2 Captured Image of the Respondent and the House Figure 3 shows that the application has successfully integrated the Google Maps and coordinates for geotagging. Here, the image that was captured was associated to the points to provide users with visual representation of the house location. The Map View can be focused using the capture keys and touch gestures to pan and zoom the map automatically. It also provides all of the UI elements necessary for users to control the map. The GPS settings will automatically pop-up in this view providing a user option whether to enable or disable the GPS. The images captured can be uploaded back to the server for the web application mapping. Upload status are provided so that unfinished and pending image that needs to be uploaded can be sent to the server. Figure 3 Sample snapshot of Geotagging and Image Uploading Figure 4 shows the images of the facilities and commercial establishments gathered during the pilot testing on a particular barangay. The image uploaded by the android application is saved into the server, using the web application these images were attached to their corresponding points. Due to the amount of size these numerous pictures may consume in the storage, pictures are compressed into a smaller resolution. Image compression is done in the image upload. An image with a higher resolution does not provide any visible benefit, but still takes up precious memory and incurs additional performance overhead due to additional on the fly scaling.
Figure 4 Web Application Geotagging 4. CONCLUSION The results of this study showed that with the help of the Android Technology, Google APIs and assisted GPS, current location are acquired much faster. However even with the help of AGPS, factors such as amount of interference example weather conditions and cloudy sky still affects the accuracy of the coordinates given. It will be more appropriate to conduct field validation under a good weather condition to acquire best results. Because of a faster location acquisition, less processing power is required by the device, therefore, it saves phone battery life. Also, the images captured by the device are of high resolution; errors were avoided when the image sizes were reduced before being displayed in the app. Scaling down the image is an effective way to minimize the memory used by the application. This application is very simple to use and is helpful to capture multiple respondents and houses displaying initial information together with the visual representation of their map location. 5. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT The researchers would like to give thanks to the City Government of Butuan for the trust, utmost support and for funding the Comprehensive Land Information and Management System using GIS (CLAIMS-GIS) Project. Also, we are very much thankful to the strong support of the Caraga State University in the implementation of this project. 6. REFERENCES [1] http://www.windowscentral.com/gps-vs-agps-quick-tutorial [2] Hassan,Z.S, 2008. Ubiquitous computing and android. 3 rd International Conference on Digital information Management, pp. 166-171. [3] Mantas, V. M., Liu, Z., Pereira, A. J. S. C., 2015. A web service and android application for the distribution of rainfall estimates and Earth observation data. Computers and GeoSciences Journal, pp. 66-76 [4] Android Developers. Android Location Package, 2010. [5] Android Developers. MediaStore, 2010. [6] Android Developers. SQLiteOpenHelper, 2010. [7] Siddartha Sreenivasa Reddy, 2011. Trip Tracker Application on Android, pp. 8-14. [8] Ananya S., Venkatalakshmi B., 2011. Location Based Intelligent Mobile Organizer p. 488 [9] Bhosale Deepak V., Kshirsagar Suraj S., Gaikwad Amit B., Londhe Namdev B., Jagtap Mahesh S., Android Based Mobile Smart Tracking System. Vol. 5 Issue 1 January 2015.