Studies at Flinders University

For the past year I have been studying for a Bachelor of Science (Honours) degree at Flinders University specialising in Information Systems. I completed the thesis component of the degree in November 2011 and have two remaining course work topics to complete in the first half of 2012.

Honours Thesis

The topic of my honours thesis was as follows:

Is it possible to provide collaborative mapping services on mobile devices in an infrastructure independent manner?

To explore this question I developed an Android based application that could support four core objectives. They were:

1. have the users own geographic location displayed on a map;
2. add incidents, represented by a marker, onto a map;
3. be able to see the geographic location of other users of the application on the map; and
4. share details of incidents with other users of the application on the network.

The prototype application is released as Open Source software and is available on GitHub. The software uses a resilient Ad Hoc mesh network powered by the Serval Project software to support telecommunications infrastructure independent networking. It also uses the mapsforge library to support the generation of a map using data sourced from OpenStreetMap and stored on the mobile phone.

The thesis is available here in both HTML and PDF format. It was prepared using MultiMarkdown and the files were edited using the MultiMarkdown Composer.

Downloads

The following documents are available for download:

The project proposal presentation in both PDF format and Keynote format.

The results seminar presentation in both PDF format and Keynote format.

The poster presentation in both PDF format and Pages format which won an award.

The honours thesis in PDF format.