Location-based routing application for hostels: A case study of Makerere University

Abstract

Globally, information and communication technology (ICT) has rapidly developed over the few past years and changed how people capture, process store and disseminate information across various platforms and is an important driver of social and economic development. The effect of advancing technology has inevitably had an impact on Land surveying on a global scale. The increasing acceptance of using mobile devices and applications to perform everyday tasks has created a market for handling some of the land surveying activities such as navigation and routing to desired locations using smartphones in developed countries. With these increasing numbers of freshmen students there is ignorance among the new students of the accommodation facilities such as a variety of hostels, their functional details along with their geographical positions relative to the surrounding areas therefore the aim of this project was to develop a location based and routing application to aid students in selecting the most suitable hostel based on their needs, positioning as well as routing around the campus using recent and upcoming mapping and location providers “HERE Technologies” In order to determine which factors would cause a student to choose a specific hostel, functional details of hostels were modelled after questioning some students on what matters most to them when choosing a hostel. Using a system architecture called client and server architecture which uses a request-response protocol the application was developed using HERE SDK lite, android studio and java programming language to add capabilities such as map display in various layers, hostel makers and popups showing functional details of each hostel, routing and search capabilities. The result of this project illustrated a mobile application which can be used especially by students around Makerere University to themselves get acquainted with the environment, chose hostels based on various functional details available to them surveyors, do routing and searching for points of interest. The application showed its ability to communicate with the HERE map servers in providing these capabilities except for hostel markers and their corresponding popups showing details of hostels imbedded within the application data itself. However, the mobile application does not include the ability to display user’s location on the map due to the use of lite version of the SDK with limited functionality other than premium that has all tools. Here maps topology isn’t the best because it creates routes that aren’t as accurate especially in Africa where map edits are still being added and maps updated