"Our Navigator"A Location Based User Required Information Provider

Abstract

The usage of mobile phones is increasing gradually and progressively. People are looking for everything to be done by a message or a phone call. Hence, they make sure to carry their mobile phone always with them where ever they move. There are many Locations based systems (LBS) developed to act as information services but, rare to see a simple cost effective solution which provides location details of close facility services such as ATM, restaurant and Gas station, associated with the details of the quality of the service. The system presented in this dissertation, “Our navigator” is a community based application which provides information to the user by an information service provider. The location data, user rating and other characteristics which describe the quality of service of a particular place are stored in the database and it is updated periodically by information sources. The user makes request to the main server via SMS messages or a simple mobile interface. The responses are produced by the system based on the proximity, user rating and may be filtered based on user context. The definition of those filters and the determination of a user rating value per place are based on the user feedback collected by the system. User feedback are collected as they are and stored in the database. Those feedbacks are processed periodically by an intelligent component which is a neural network to determine the quality characteristics. User location is tracked by the user input unless the mobile phone has inbuilt Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and then GPS is used as the positioning method to locate the user and Google geo-coding web services are used for reverse geo-coding purposes. The system was implemented using .Net technologies, C# programming language and J2ME for the mobile client. SQL server is used as the database. The system design includes the expandable system architecture of the current system as “Our navigator” can be expanded to build up a knowledgebase which is updated by a community to serve the community as a mobile yellow page.