Consistent visualization and querying of GIS databases by a location-aware mobile agent

Location-aware mobile users need to access, query, and visualize, geographic information in a wide variety of applications including tourism, navigation, environmental management, and emergency response. Often they also need to communicate information back and forth with other mobile users or with a central agency. Depending upon the task, the user may have to share or switch between different databases or different views of the same database. We first describe our efforts to create a consistent visualization of different spatial geographic databases consisting of aerial imagery, AutoCAD drawings, schematic diagrams, and street maps. The location of a mobile user is obtained via GPS (global positioning system) and visualized synchronously across different visualizations. Our focus then is to support the mobile user in visually accessing and querying the spatial GIS databases. The mobile or the central user can interact with the database in real-time and communicate the information to each other over wireless networks. The system supports a variety of queries and tasks ("how far", "where", "closest" etc.) for many different types of geometric primitives (points, lines, polygons etc.) and objects (buildings, metro stops etc.). The output results can then be unobtrusively and consistently displayed to the user across multiple views of the scene.