Design And Development Of Near-Teal-Time Mobile-Based Field Surveying System

Mobile technologies benefit from a huge interest nowadays,and the advantages of mobile applications in numerous domains are widely acknowledged.Emergence of embedded Global Navigation Satellite Systems(GNSS)receivers and multiple wireless communication means for mobile devices has attracted attention from various scientific curricula.Field data collection is a crucial stage for spatial information users that generally require instantaneous data flows at lower costs for many reasons,such as collecting ground control points,creating a ground truth data,classifying plant or animal species and more.However,the diversity and unique characteristics of fieldwork projects present various challenges for the design,implementation,and support of mobile-based field surveying solutions.Even achieving high digital data collection efficiency,most proposed solutions presented shortcomings regarding their compatibility,interoperability and versatility.The thesis aims to respond to the need of making instantaneously available field surveying data,A system has to be designed and developed in order to ensure near-real-time data availability and,furthermore,respect interoperability,compatibility and versatility aspects.The proposed solution is composed of a Spatial Data Infrastructure(SDI)that provides multiple Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC)services and a mobile application for near-real-time field surveying.The mobile application design and development presents high levels of compatibility and versatility and,furthermore,responds to several field context challenges.Additionally,the overall system development has been achieved at the lowest costs by relying exclusively on Free and Open Source Software(FOSS)components.The realization of the system included several investigations and evaluations in order to opt for the best tools and components for the system.Evaluation of map servers has been conducted to elect the appropriate server side component,while similar evaluation has addressed the Web mapping frameworks to select the one that satisfies most of our application's needs.The resulting application has been deployed on a real Android-powered mobile device and several tests have been conducted in outdoor field data collection tasks nearby the Information Department of Wuhan University.Collected data is transferred instantaneously to the server using cellular network,which allowed desktop applications to visualize it in near-real-time.Multiple sensors have been used for acquiring data including the GNSS receiver,the embedded camera and the microphone.The device's location is combined with textual information,pictures and audio records and saved as attributes along its corresponding geometry.The solution proposed in this thesis surpasses most existing mobile field surveying solutions by expanding their digital data collection capacity in two main directions.Firstly,the wireless communication capability is harnessed to transmit instantaneously the collected data,which is important for many cases such as in disaster management.Secondly,the data is stored,manipulated and disseminated in standardized geospatial formats allowing their immediate integration with other geospatial services,encouraging the collaboration between and reducing deployment costs for the different stakeholders.