WEBPARK LOCATION BASED SERVICES FOR SPECIES SEARCH IN RECREATION AREA

The paper describes research work in the area of mobile cartography as part of IST-project WebPark. It presents the concept and development of a location based service for searching for species information in a recration area. With help of this concrete use case, questions about dynamic cartographic symbolisation of point objects can be investigated, which will be hopefully prove generic enough to draw conclusions for all types of thematic information and points of interest. After a short introduction to the WebPark project, the conclusions of a user questionnaire and results of first trial with ArcPad software are presented. The goal is that research work and software development regularly evaluated against the user requirements. For the species search application, a model of question types is created which considers three things; the spatial nature of the questions, how wildlife semantics are used and the intention of the questions. The answer model includes the manifold research projects, which were done in Swiss national park. Adopting this project view ensures that visitors are provided with answers correct to the best of the park’s knowledge. The suggested user-interface allows the question and answer control, based on the developed models. Finally, scale and generalisation issues in the portrayal of wildlife information are described. Based on the model-view-controller paradigm, three components will be used to generate adapted maps model generalisation, an organisation and interpretation component and view generalisation component. 1. INTRODUCTION AND WEBPARK PROJECT The WebPark project is a European research and development project (running between 10/2001-09/2004), which aims to create a platform to deliver Location Based Services in protected and recreation areas. Location Based Services denotes position dependent, personalised services, which are tailored for the individual requirements of tourists and visitors. As a result, the users are enabled to request information from several databases on the internet, whereby the data are filtered with reference to a personal user profile, time relevance and current position. In most cases the selected information has a spatial reference, therefore presentation with maps is emminently suitable, but also additional explanation in form of text, pictures and video are available. The WebPark consotium consists of partners from industry; European Aeronautic Defence and Space Company, Geodan Mobile Solutions, sciences; City University London, University Zurich, Laboratório Nacional de Engenharia Civil Lissabon, and national parks; the Swiss National Park. The industry partners are mainly responsible for developing architecture and webmapping technology. Swiss National Park provides content, such as animal and plant observations, route descriptions, POI etc. and enables the WebPark services to be tested. The research institutes investigate questions about knowledge discovery, the use of intelligent agents and dynamic visualisation on small displays with help of cartographic generalisation (1). Knowledge discovery in the context of the WebPark project is used to create spatio-temporal metadata for services and information [2]. Results could be visualized as several surfaces such as densitiy, visibility and accessibility. Density surfaces of user tracks indicate where time has been spent. Visibility surfaces give information on whether a user can see a location, or allow queries that include whether a user is within a POI’s viewshed. Surfaces storing mean velocity derived from all users’ mobile trajectories provide a measure of accessibility. Geographic knowledge could be extracted from databases of users’ spatio-temporal behaviour to generate summaries and patterns that agents can refer. The agents can then rank available information dependent on user profile, previous behaviour as well as spatio-temporal context. The geographic knowledge discovery component facilitates the creation of map layers which can classify characteristics of specific users and aggregate behaviour. The agent component can then convert this information into a measure of the accessibility of a specific location. This measure can be used to rank the accessibility of the user to different information sources in a more sophisticated form than simple distance functions. For development of WebPark services some assumption are made [3]: • Each visitor has a defined user profile. • The visitor does not want to perform exhaustive searches for information. • The visitor will not know the structure of information available. • The cartographic visualisation will be on a small screen. 2. USER REQUIREMENTS AND FIRST TRIAL WITH ARCPAD Consultations with users as well as the periodical tests are necessary to consider the end user requirements.