Joe wakes up to a beautiful Sunday morning. Without much planning, he sets out for a holiday. As he disembarks, his Jini wishes him, "Good Morning Sir! Welcome to Helsinki square. Can I help you?" Joe commands "Breakfast!". Within seconds, the Jini informs, "Pizzeria Italiano, A-10, Central Market. Cheese pizza + large cola today only 60 FIM!!" He is supplied with a map that guides him to the nearby pizzeria where the Jini has already booked a seat for him. He next queries for the nearest cinema hall. Upon indication of a choice, the Jini guides him to the Cinema hall after having booked his favorite corner seat in the box. He comes out of the hall, and commands the Jini to help him locating a cab service within 500 meters. Within 2 minutes, the cab company identifies Joe’s location from the map Jini generates for them, and agrees to pick him up in five minutes.

No we are not in the medieval ages and Joe is not the son of Aladdin. Joe’s Jini is nothing but his PDA hooked up to a futuristic service provider. The service provider leveraging on the capabilities of Project Dynamap.

Developing such futuristic apps for the next generation mobile environment is a hurculian task. Our futuristic Jini lies on the opening of a chasm. Project Dynamap is a solemn effort towards bringing the mobile world out of the same.

The method is about combining the contemporary technologies of image processing, dynamic map handling, hypertext mining, web-link analyses and global positioning to develop an idiot-proof system for travelers, historians and other mobile users.

The proposed system works in the following manner. The coordinates of a client device are provided by GPS, or GSM network. It is not interesting to just to get the co-ordinates. But what could interest the use would be the data related to the coordinates, that we call location-based information.

Given coordinates (x,y), find pointers to the city/town/village where we are in we locate the web servers providing information from this city/town/village.

We then specify some kind schemes WHAT information is interesting.

* NAME of the city, hotels, restaurants, shops, pizzerias
* Gasoline stations, car services
* Maps guiding to these relevent places

What is not interesting for a world traveler: city council documents, history of the city, and so on. Only the acute information is relevant when he/she is moving by the car.

On the other hand, the system could identify the client as a historian. In this case, the system would venture into the depths of history of a place and provide it to the user on demand, on the scale supported by his device.

Location based information is ubiquitous on the Internet with a plethora of travel and location specific sites sprouting up. These sites provide specific information about restricted domains in general. A mobile user is usually constrained in time and bandwidth domain. Expecting her to access web sites on the move is a tall asking. We suggest a novel approach to concoct a method to fill this void between an information bank and a potential user on the move. Some essential features of such a system in a mobile environment or otherwise would be the extraction of the relevant part of the information.

For this the location of the device is extracted. If location not provided, then address is retrieved and using address, access (via WAP) an address service that provides coordinate <=> address conversations and present the result to user.

The information could be presented by (a) plotting on the map, (b) giving navigational information to the user. One scheme might be to ALERT when approaching some object (e.g. pizzeria), the system might blink on the screen that "approaching Pizzeria Raxx". Clever systems might even show that "Family size pizza + large cola today only 60 FIM!!"

The Bottom Line:

"From The Land Beyond Beyond, 
From The Land Past Hope And Fear,
I Bid You Genie Now Appear."

The final result of Project Dynamap would not be as interesting as making the Jini appear on chanting these. But it sure would be a step towards climbing out of the contemporary abyssmal pit!