Wearable personal sensing workshop

SPACER presentation at the Wearable personal sensing workshop gets mentioned on the JISC Notes From the Future TechWatch blog.

SPACER accepted for EGU 2010

An abstract based on SPACER has been accepted for the 2010 General Assembly of the European Geosciences Union(EGU). The presentation will be on Thursday 6th May 2010 at the Austria Center Vienna (ACV) in Vienna.

SPACER accepted for Phase 2 of Persistent Testbed

A use case based on SPACER has been accepted for the second phase of the AGILE-EuroSDR-OGC Persistent Testbed (PTB).

Final Progress Post

o Title of Primary Project Output: SPACER: In-field discovery of geoscientific data from mobile phones

o Screenshots or diagram of prototype:

o Description of Prototype: SPACER software enables GPS-supported mobile phones, running Google’s Android platform, to query metadata repositories supporting the catalogue service standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC).

o End User of Prototype: students and researchers in any discipline that requires fieldwork e.g geology, geophysics, archaeology and geomatics.

o Link to working prototype: click here

o Link to end user documentation: click here

o Link to code repository or API: click here

o Link to technical documentation: click here

o Date prototype was launched: Tuesday 8th December 2009

o Project Team Names, Emails and Organisations:

 Project Manager: Mike Jackson, mike.jackson@nottingham.ac.uk, Centre for Geospatial Science – University of Nottingham

 Software Engineer: Gobe Hobona, Gobe.Hobona@nottingham.ac.uk, Centre for Geospatial Science – University of Nottingham

 Stakeholder Representative(BGS): Colm Jordan, cjj@bgs.ac.uk, British Geological Survey

 Stakeholder Representative(Edina): Ben Butchart, b.butchart@ed.ac.uk, Edina – University of Edinburgh

o Project Website: click here

o PIMS entry: click here

o Table of Content for Project Posts:
 Introducing SPACER
 Day-to-Day work
 Small Wins & Fails
 Project SWOTing
 User Participation-Use Case
 User Participation-User and Functional Requirements
 Day-to-Day work 2
 Small Wins and Fails 2
 Prototype Status Video
 Ranking Results
 LBS2009 Showcase
 MapView on the move
 Source Code released
 SPACER at Londroid Android meeting
 SPACER goes into testing
 Technical Standards
 Value Add
 User Testing

Prototype Status Video

A video demonstrating version 1.0 of the prototype is now available.

User Testing

On December 7th 2009, researchers from BGS, Edina and CGS undertook a SPACER usability evaluation. The activity involved walking along footpaths on Jubilee Campus. The evaluation went well, both the client and server-side applications performed well. The feedback was very useful and will be applied to future development of the application.

Value Add

The change from JavaME on Symbian to Java on Android was the most significant change. The change was made due to signing restrictions on JavaME Midlets.
Another significant change was the choice of Deegree CSW over Geonetwork CSW. The reason for the change was that, at the time, Geonetwork spatial filters did not include ‘contains’ operations.

Technical standards

Web Service Standards

SPACER is using the Catalogue Service for the Web(CSW) standard of the Open Geospatial Consortium(OGC). The standard allows a client to send requests to a metadata registry in either Key-Value-Pairs(through HTTP GET) or XML(through HTTP POST). The response is in XML. This approach appears to give SPACER performance of 10 seconds to request, process and present search results on an Android emulator. On the HTC Hero the response time is about 5-7 seconds depending on the status of the network. On a desktop search engine, this performance would be unacceptable. However, in a location based application where the datasets have spatial footprints several meters wide, search results are not likely to change during that 7 seconds (unless if the user is sprinting across a field). Therefore, we consider this performance to be acceptable.

Of course an option is to use REST, by creating a REST-to-CSW mediator.

A position statement of the OGC on REST is available at the following URL:

http://portal.opengeospatial.org/files/?artifact_id=32222

Another option is for the OGC to create a CSW profile for mobile applications by creating a subset of the FGDC metadata standard. For the same number of elements, FGDC metadata has fewer characters than ISO19115/19139. This is because the latter has several nested XML elements.

Programming Languages

We use Eclipse and its Android plug-in so we develop in Java. Sometimes it is disappointing to find that a useful standard Java class has been removed in Android’s Java version. However, so far the Android blogs and forums have pointed to useful alternatives.

SPACER Goes Into Live Testing

The prototype has gone into live testing on the University of Nottingham’s LBS testsite. Using an HTC Hero and T-Mobile’s 3G network. Tests so far indicate a stable and reliable implementation.

Surprisingly, the HTC Hero is faster than the Android Emulator we used in laboratory tests!

SPACER at London Android User Group

SPACER will feature at the Londroid user group on October 22nd 2009. Visit the Londroid website for more details.