Screenshots of Route-me evaluations with OS Open and Historic data shown. Feature opacity slider and location fix marker
At the point of writing, an open version of the native app with Ordnance Survey Open Data and Open Historic Maps from the National Library of Scotland is being prepared for submission to the Apple App Store as a free app. This is to provide us with some experience in pushing apps through the App Store review process and to establish EDINA’s presence in the market place. At the same time, the iPhone version of the “Walking Through Time” application has been built on top of the prototype from this evaluation and will be released to the AppStore as part of the second phase of the “Walking Through Time” project.
Summary - A custom build hybrid iPhone application which integrates an embedded web browser for online mapping with photo capture functionality implemented in objective-C so that photos could be taken and geo tagged (using information from the Unlock feature service) and viewed on a map interface. In this evaluation we extended the native application described above to allow a user to integrate the camera into the application so that the user could geo tag a photograph with additional gazetteer information related to the place the photo was taken from. Typically smart phone cameras already geo tag the photograph with longitude and latitude. In this application the photograph was tagged with additional information such as administrative boundaries retrieved from a query to the Unlock [10] service. The user can then upload the image to a repository and can thereafter switch back to a map view showing flags at the location of photographs taken with the system.
The aim of this evaluation was to explore the potential for user generated data gathering in the field. The integration of the camera device into the application proved simple and we can see this functionality as a useful addition to a Digimap4Mobile client, particularly useful to help students share experiences in the round up session after a field exercise. An earlier version of this app integrated the camera with an embedded web browser to create a hybrid application where the mapping was achieved using mobile web technologies but seamlessly integrated with the camera, something that would not be possible with a pure mobile web application.