A Multiagent-Based Approach for Real Time Mobile Map Generation

Nowadays, anywhere and anytime, anyone can access geospatial data using mobile devices which provide geospatial services for a variety of needs such as tourism, transportation management, emergency and military use. These services are getting easier to disseminate and to use as a result of new technological advances. However, their quality needs to be improved especially in terms of personalization. To enhance this personalization, the mapping application must autonomously adapt the contents of maps, on-the-fly, to users´ needs, contexts, and mobile devices characteristics. To this end, it must determine and apply the suitable transformations, in real-time, to spatial objects. Since these transformations are time consuming, the mapping application must be based on an efficient approach that optimizes the generation and transfer of data to users. In this context, we propose a multiagent-based approach that tackles important problems related to map personalization, generation, and transfer. Our approach emphasizes objects which are important to the user by improving their legibility and using symbols that help the user to better understand the geographic space. In addition, our approach generates and transfers the required maps simultaneously using an innovative progressive map generation by layers of interest approach. A layer of interest contains objects that have the same importance to the user. This content, which depends on the user´s needs and the map´s context of use, is determined on-the-fly. As soon as a given layer of interest is generated, it is transmitted to the user. Since the user can stop the map generation process whenever he finds the required information from the amount of data already transferred, his waiting delays are reduced. In addition, his costs are reduced since data is reused on the client side. In order to illustrate our approach, we apply it to the context of tourist mobile mapping applications