Mobile Geographic Information Systems: A Case Study on Mansoura University, Egypt

With the rapid development of GIS, embedded technology and wireless communication technology, mobile GIS becomes an active research area in the field of GIS. Information collection is one of the most promising application directions of mobile GIS. The purpose of this paper is to study the field of geographical information systems to propose a contribution in solving one of the bottlenecks that stumbles researchers from getting benefit of this field.

This research used WAP technology to facilitate the communication and data transfer between the end user and the GIS server. This enables the authors to solve the small storage area problem of mobile devices. The basic idea of the suggested solution is based on saving the layers and the database on the GIS server and executing queries on the Server instead of using the mobile storage that's so small comparing with PCS, so we saved the storage area in mobiles. The small storage area of mobiles is a great problem facing this research area.

Two prototypes were built on Mansoura University as a case study. The first one is an execution of location-based systems (LBS) and the second one is an execution of field-based systems (FBS). Applying the first prototype has proved to achieve its aims in helping the University's management in making surveys on all the distributed computers in the university while they are in their offices without the need to go to the site. Applying the second one has proved that the new comers found it's useful in helping them get the information they needed as well as telling them how to get there from here without any trouble.