Performance evaluation of storing and querying spatial data on mobile devices for offline location based services

Use of location based services has been gaining popularity over the years especially with the increase in smartphone sales. The benefits include helping you find nearby places of interest like a restaurant, cafe, atm among others and additional information like location and distance and providing navigation assistance to these places. In most cases such services are dependent on the availability of an internet connection on the phone. Thus the use of such services is lost in scenarios where an internet connection is not available or not used (due to expensive internet plans) like when visiting another country. We evaluate the performance of querying spatial data when stored locally on the mobile device. The circular query and the pointing gesture based geowand query are performed on a copy of the OpenStreetMap data stored in SQLite on the mobile device. The SpatiaLite extension provides the vector geodatabase functionalities to query such databases. In this paper we report on the performance of such queries on mobile devices. We also compare some features of this offline prototype with alternative proprietary solutions like Google Places and highlight the importance of Open data and crowdsourcing.