Development of a Mobile Mapping Solution for Spatial Data Collection using Open-Source Technologies

Information technologies and sport resources aid the potential to transform governmental organizations services, and play an important role in contributing to sustainable communities, respectively. Low-cost tools combining a user-friendly and customized data interaction (forms, mapping, media support) are still in an early stage. Recognizing benefits - efficiency, effectiveness, proximity to citizens - that Mozambican Minister of Youth and Sports (MJD) can achieve employing a low-cost data collection solution, this paper describes the development and implementation of a Geospatial Information System (GIS) mapping application (app) - m-SportGIS - under Open-Source (OS) technologies, customizing an evolutionary and incremental methodology. The app development embraced the combination of mobile web technologies and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) (e.g. Sencha Touch (ST), Apache Cordova) to deploy a native-to-the-device (Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 running Android OS 4.0)app, taking advantage of device capabilities (e.g. File system, Geolocation, Camera). In addition to the integrated Web Map Service (WMS), a tile caching procedure was carried out to produce a network-communication-independent (offline) Tile Map Service (TMS) regarding IT infrastructures limitations in several Mozambican areas. m-SportGIS is currently being exploited by Mozambican Government staff to inventory all kind of sport facilities, which feeds a WebGIS platform to manage Mozambican sport resources. (C) 2014 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.