Effective Collaborative Mapping Based on Mobile Devices

Abstract

There are numerous situations when it is utmost important to share efficiently some spatial data among a group of people. Floods can be taken as an obvious example. Many stakeholders including mayor or rescue service workers must have actual information about the conditions in the terrain. And most importantly, all of these can contribute to the information. Among these situations involving the crisis management, we dare to mention especially the inventory process. Traffic signs, road lanes, trees, lights and many other different object must be regularly maintained. Most of the organizations use some kind of geographical information system to keep the information about the maintained property. Our article is focused on development of mobile application that allows to acquire spatial data that are later used in these information systems. Thanks to real-time data synchronization between multiple devices, field workers can cooperate and share data immediately to an operating center or with the other workers. We describe the design of our mobile mapping application, comparison with other existing solutions and problems of real-time synchronization between different devices. Finally, we provide details about application usage in different municipalities.