Mobile phone GIS based on mobile SVG

Abstract

GIS applications to mobile devices are becoming increasingly popular, utilizing a diverse range of devices. Many of these devices suffer from serious constrains in three main areas: processor speed, memory space and screen size. This paper presents a new mobile GIS application, based on Mobile SVG (a subset of scalable vector graphics), TinyLineSVG (www.tinyline.com), which is intended for heavily resource constrained hand held devices. This application is a tourism-oriented map application of the Shenzhen territory for mobile phone. This application adopts mobile SVG (SVG Tiny and SVG Basic) as carrier of map and data, TinyLineSVG as display tool and also SVG parser. Mobile SVG is a subset of SVG. Mobile SVG is suitable for highly restricted mobile devices. Mobile SVG profiles introduce constraints on content, such as attribute types, properties, and user agent behavior, because of the low memory, low CPU power and limited display of mobile devices. TinyLineSVG is a J2ME class library for high-performance graphics. TinyLineSVG is J2ME SDK intended to expand the graphics capabilities of J2ME on mobile devices. The SDK supports the 2D imaging model. TinyLineSVG parses SVG files and gets data of map then displays the SVG file as a map. This application was designed to perform satisfactorily on devices (mobile phones) with low processor speed, and small memory for the GIS application and GIS data. Memory requirements are kept low by using Mobile SVG. The main challenge of satisfactory map drawing speed is addressed through TinyLineSVG that was developed for this application. The paper describes the application's data format-Mobile SVG, presents the map drawing tool, and points out the areas for future development.