Location-Aware Environmental Monitoring For Mobile Workers (ePub)

Master's Thesis from the year 2008 in the subject Computer Science - Commercial Information Technology, grade: Sehr Gut, University of Vienna (Distributed und Multimedia Systems), course: Spezialisierung: Vernetzte und Verteilte Systeme, language: English, abstract: The aim of this master's thesis ist to investigate the practicability and usability of mobile GIS applications in a selected real-world scenario in the field. Therefore the important questions are how to provide correct geospatial positioning values and how to support the gathering of useful data in extreme field situations by implementing a mobile GIS prototype. The whole project discussed in this thesis was initiated by the "Institute of Distributed and Multimedia Systems" (Faculty of Computer Sciences) through the "Austrian GRID" initiative in a close collaboration with the Umweltbundesamt, the "Federal Environment Agency of Austria". An environmental observation area in the national park "Northern Calcareous Alps" in Upper Austria, called "Zöbelboden" was chosen to test the accuracy of GPS signals and according positioning data in forested or mountainous areas as well as to study the advantages
and benefits of using mobile devices in outdoor situations and free nature. This area, a part of the UN ECE's Integrated Monitoring Programme, is used for long-term environmental data in selected observation areas. Exactly this project is a multidisciplinary International Cooperative Programme (ICP) on Integrated Monitoring (IM) of Air Pollution Effects on Ecosystems, which covers regions of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE).
In this master thesis a prototype will be introduced which allows capturing the desired ecological data digitally using a personal digital assistant (PDA). An easy-to-use application based on ESRI's ArcPad Application Developer has been developed for use on Windows Mobile PocketPCs which integrates the Umweltbundesamt's own ESRI data layers. Thus, the mobile device is prepared for data integration into a data GRID infrastructure of the Umweltbundesamt. This new prototype is a GPS-assisted client, which enables location-awareness and further allows mobile users to augment the collected data with comments, digital photos, digital audio, or even small movies
of artifacts, like trees and other plants. All digitally collected data by the mobile workers can be easily transferred to the Umweltbundesamt's currently used ecological information system MORIS (a relational database).