Mobile Device User Level Interface for Dynamic Access to Spatial Data

The use of handheld devices, such as cell phones, PDAs or pocket computers as tools for querying spatial data in mobile environments, is becoming increasingly popular. Thus, there is a need for simple and user-friendly interfaces to allow users to pose adhoc queries. At present, Query-By-Example (QBE) is available as a user-friendly interface, developed for accessing a RDBMS on a desktop computer. In this paper, we propose extensions for QBE to support spatial queries on mobile devices. It is accordingly named as Spatial mQBE (m stands for mobile). An empirical study shows that Spatial mQBE is a simple and an intuitive interface which facilitates the dynamic expression of both spatial and common database queries. The main strengths of this interface are its simplicity to express a query and its expressive power