GEODIVA: A PLATFORM FOR GENERATING CUSTOMIZED MOBILE APPS FOR GEOSPATIAL DATA ENTRY

摘要

Solutions to practically every problem facing society, including biodiversity, health, food security, climate change, and poverty, depend on up-to-date information about biophysical and/or social conditions. In most cases, that information has a spatial component. Smart mobile devices, equipped with GPS receivers, cameras, accelerometers, and easy-to-handle touch screen interfaces, have tremendous potential as tools for gathering geo-located field data in a wide range of disciplines. In fact, many software packages are currently available for mobile data gathering. Often, however, these applications have characteristics that reduce their effectiveness in the developing world, including high cost, lack of internationalization, use of proprietary data formats, a domain-specific focus and a requirement for network connectivity. We have developed a system called GeoDIVA (Geographic Data Input and Validation for All) which remedies these problems. GeoDIVA is a free web platform that allows individuals or groups to generate customized mobile apps for geo-tagged data entry, simply by entering their specifications into a web form and clicking a button. GeoDIVA apps are easy to create, easy to use, available in the user's local language, tailored for the specific problem the user is trying to address, useful without Internet connectivity, and designed to save geographic and attribute data in a simple, standard format that can be imported into many common desktop applications, including both commercial and open-source GIS. In this paper, we describe the concepts and architecture of GeoDIVA, and demonstrate how it meets the need for specialized mobile data gathering for users in a wide range of disciplines.