Intelligent bus information service with the support of mobile social community on the Internet

This paper presents an intelligent bus system and services with the force of the masses to provide real-time bus information. Consider that while waiting for buses on the road, we often have no idea about how long we have to wait for, or which bus we can take for a destination. The information that we can get is quite limited, this situation which motivates us to design and develop a real-time bus information system. This system can group bus passengers on the same route as a virtual social community where participants can share time and location tags during travelling by buses. Then, the system can derive real-time bus information from a collection of user-provided data. Technically, the system combines users' geographic information, via GPS and NFC built-in with mobile devices, and their virtual social relations on the Internet, thus acquiring a set of practical bus information services, for example, when a bus will arrive, where a bus is, and what a bus route is. Accordingly, this paper specifies the proposed system design, development work, and prototypical implementation. Prototypical demonstration shows the interesting scenario of a social-based bus information service, as well as its feasibility in ubiquitous network environments.