A Novel Advertising Application Using GPS and GISPhani K. Sagiraju University of Texas at San Antonio San Antonio, TX, USA Madhavi Rudraraju RaghaSudha Bommidi JNTU, Hyderabad, INDIA Abstract: Location Based Services (LBS) are offered based on user's geographical location provided by positioning technology such as Global Positioning System (GPS), and with the help of Geographical Information Systems (GIS). This paper focuses on LBS in a whole new dimension. Here the authors present an idea that is a commercial advertising feature. For example, any commercial firm will be advertising for publicity, so the idea is to incorporate the advertising feature into devices. In short, a new advertising application is proposed, which is more useful for commercial firms eager to promote their business around their own location. The idea is a commercial firm willing to advertise shall provide their location and will mention the area in which they want to advertise. So when ever someone with GPS enabled device enters the advertised area will automatically be notified with their commercial. The main objective of this application is to use geoprocessing tool with network analyst. The idea is demonstrated as a desktop application by creating a layer file with an advertising buffer along with the commercial of that firm. Now if the user’s location on the map is within the advertising buffer, the commercial is activated. As a part future work, the idea can be extended to real time application by developing a layer file, which when downloaded onto any system will be compatible with the already existing GIS application. I. INTRODUCTION In the age of information outburst and technological advancements, location-awareness is becoming a key feature in the modern communications era. Mobile phones and the Internet have revolutionized the communication and with it the lifestyle of people. An increasing number of mobile phones and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA) allow people to access internet where ever they are and when ever they want. From internet they can obtain on hand information on events (cinema, concerts, and parties) and other information on places (city maps, restaurants, museums, hospitals). The ubiquitous location-awareness utilizes geographical positions or location information of the mobile devices or that of the mobile user. Location-Based Technologies find its way in a variety of applications such as wireless location services, geographic information systems (GIS), surveillance, Navigation, military equipment tracking, and many more. Location Based Service or LBS is the capability to find the geographical location of the mobile user and then provide services based on this location information. They open a new market for developers to develop and deploy value-added services. Location based information applications vary in different aspects like some may be very location-centric, and others may use location information to provide information or advertisements relevant to a particular user at their current location. Such location based information is expected to have a significant influence on user behavior. Providing location information to facilitate these services is far from straight forward and often requires significant changes in software and hardware to produce high degrees of localization [1]. LBS allow consumers to receive services based on their geographic information about restaurants, retail stores, and travel arrangements. Such services can be provided in response to a customers manual input of his or her location to track the location of the consumer automatically. LBS information flow is shown in Fig 1 [2]. As can be seen from the figure, LBS offer a two-way communication system between user and service provider. Therefore the user tells the service provider his actual context like the kind of information he needs, his preferences and his position. This helps the provider of such location services to deliver information tailored to the user needs. So in finding the location Global Positioning System (GPS) plays a major role. GPS is a worldwide satellite navigational system formed by a constellation of 24 earth orbiting satellites. The satellites orbit the earth at approximately 20,000 kilometers above the surface and make two complete revolutions every 24 hours. The GPS satellites continuously broadcast navigation message and code signals of a standard positioning service (SPS). By using navigation message from more than four satellites, GPS receivers calculate their own location.  Figure 1. Location Based Services (LBS) Information Flow Geographic Information System (GIS), also known as a geographical information system or geospatial information system, is a system for capturing, storing, analyzing and managing data and associated attributes which are spatially referenced to the Earth. LBS and GIS have some particular similarities. Geographic data is an important aspect of any location system. Geographic Information Systems (GIS) provide the tools to provision and administer base map data such as man made structures (streets, buildings) and terrain (mountains, rivers). GIS is also used to manage point-of-interest data such as location of gas stations, restaurants, nightclubs, etc. Finally, GIS information also includes information about the radio frequency characteristics of the mobile network. This allows the system to determine the serving cell site of the user. GIS uses information from many different sources in many different forms. The primary requirement for the source data consists of knowing the locations for the variables. Location may be annotated by x, y, and z coordinates of longitude, latitude, and elevation, or by other geocode systems. Both GIS and LBS have different origins each having special kinds of user groups. GIS is much older and evolved with the application of geographic data obtained from GPS satellites. It requires extensive computing resources but has been offering a wide range of functionality. Whereas LBS were originated recently by the development of mobile devices and it is more popular among individual user rather professional organization. Hence, LBS have its origin in GIS and is an intersection of different technologies including GIS, mobile Internet and telecommunication. So Geographical Information System is an inseparable part of Location Based Service like Global Positioning System (GPS), and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID). The paper is organized as follows. Section II gives a brief introduction about the development platform used. Section III explains and shows the application developed, and finally Section IV concludes the paper. II DEVELOPMENT PLATFORM ArcGIS [3] is the name of a complete GIS software system for authoring, serving, and using geographic knowledge produced by ESRI. ArcGIS provides a scalable framework for implementing GIS for a single user or many users on desktops, in servers, over the Web, and in the field. ArcGIS is an integrated family of GIS software products for building a complete GIS. It consists of four primary frameworks for deploying GIS. First, ArcGIS Desktop is an integrated suite of professional GIS applications. Most users recognize this as three products: ArcView, ArcEditor, and ArcInfo. Second is a Server GIS consisting of ArcIMS, ArcGIS Server, and ArcGIS Image Server. Third is a Mobile GIS consisting of ArcPad and ArcGIS Mobile for field computing and finally fourth is ESRI Developer Network (EDN) which is an Embeddable software components for developers to extend GIS desktops, build custom GIS applications, add custom GIS services and web applications, and for creating mobile solutions. All four ArcGIS frameworks are based on ArcObjects, a common, modular library of re-useable GIS software components. ArcObjects includes a wide variety of programmable components, ranging from finegrained objects such as individual geometry objects, to coarse-grained controls and tools such as, a map control that allows you to quickly embed a map interface into your custom application for working with GIS map documents created in ArcGIS. ArcObjects are platform independent software components, written in C++, that provide services to support GIS applications. ArcObjects is the development platform for the Arc GIS family of applications such as ArcMap, ArcCatalog, and ArcScene. The Arc Objects software components expose the full range of functionality available in ArcInfo and ArcView to software developers. ArcObjects provides an infrastructure for application customization to serve the specific needs of clients. Many of the ArcObjects that make up ArcGIS are used within all of the ArcGIS products. The most common way to customize the ArcGIS Desktop applications is through Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is embedded within ArcCatalog and ArcMap. Using VBA inside ArcGIS Desktop, one can achieve customization needs with relatively little development effort, which is eventually used to develop the application discussed next. III. APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT The whole idea of this paper is to develop a new advertising feature for commercial firms. Till date GIS and LBS systems are being used to locate different locations depending upon the user’s requirement. For example the user may be interested in knowing the route to his destination from the point of his interest, or the user may be interested to know the nearest restaurant or hospital or any stores depending upon his requirement. The idea presented here is a type of LBS but in a whole new dimension. As said earlier LBS are provided according to the user’s location and his request, whereas here, the users are notified about the commercial firm if they fall within the vicinity of the firm. It is like broadcasting the commercial to all the users available in the vicinity of the firm. The idea proposed and the application has been developed keeping in mind the commercial or business personal. Generally all the businesses want to advertise their products with in certain limit of their location, which helps them in saving their time and most importantly money. So this application has been developed as a desktop application using ArcGIS.  Figure 2. Desktop application created is shown on left and the overall application as for the future extension. Fig 2 above shows the overall idea of the application developed. At first the idea is developed and demonstrated as a desktop application which is shown to the left. The overall application would be the extension of desktop application which is shown to the right. All three, i.e., GPS provides the firms and users locations, GIS hold all the databases, and LBS are used to develop this application. The GPS is mainly used for the navigational purpose which helps in identifying the locations. Once the desired locations are identified in terms of latitude and longitude, a buffer is created around the point of interest with the help of GIS using ArcGIS software. Here the LBS are used to find to route from his present location to the location of the commercial firm. The development of this application can be envisioned in two parts. First one consists in selecting the point features which could be either restaurants or shopping complex or any other sources which are interested to advertise their product. The second part includes creating the buffer around the selected features as it is important to see that all the commercial firms advertise in a certain limit. The Buffer tool [4] is used to identify or define an area within a specified distance around a feature. The buffer created identifies all the users within a specified distance of a feature. When you have more than one firms in the same location e.g., in different floors of a building, and they are willing to advertise in the same area of vicinity, then the buffers of both the firms are overlapping. In such a situation the advertisement of the firms might appear in a round robin fashion in an alphabetic order which is theoretical. But for practical situations the advertisement of the firm which bids more will be appearing first. One other way of creating a buffer is by creating a base price. It can be something like so many meters of radius around the firm for so much of a price. Thereby depending upon the amount paid the size of the buffer is created. The more the firm pays the more the buffer will cover which of course depends upon the interest of the advertiser. This application is developed in such a way that when ever the user’s position in his GPS enabled device enters the buffered region the advertisement will be activated with the pop up message. If the person is interested he might go to the firm. This helps the business men to advertise their product with in a certain limit of his location. This saves the time for the buyer and money for the seller. Case Study As said earlier the idea of advertising is developed as a desktop application. The data considered for this application is Redlands sample data. The application consists of multiple layer files which are added as follows. The Redlands sample data is taken as the first layer, the road layout is overlaid on top of it. The third layer considered is the commercial firms data point layer. Once all the layers are added a new layer called Advertising layer is created, which consists of all the point data (positions) of the firms which are advertising along with a buffer around them that is the area in which they will be advertised. The application with all the layers is shown in Fig 3. Now we consider two points on the road layer which are the origin (A) and destination (B). It is assumed a person with GPS enabled device is traveling from point A to point B on the map. Whenever his position on the map comes over a buffer of any one of the commercial firm, he will be notified with the commercial of that firm. In this case it’s the name of the firm, as shown in Fig 4. But it is always important to see that pop up does not last for long, and if there are more than two firms with in the same buffer area the advertisement of that firm which paid more will be shown first.  Figure 3. Desktop application showing all the layers along with the advertising layer.  Figure 4. Desktop application showing advertisement when the user’s location falls within the buffer of the firm. IV. CONCLUSIONS In this paper, the authors showed Location Based Services (LBS) in a whole new dimension. Till date LBS are user point of view but here it was shown from consumer point of view. A new advertising application is introduced, which is more useful for commercial firms eager to promote their business around their own location. The idea is a commercial firm willing to advertise shall provide their location and will mention the area in which they want to advertise. So when ever someone with GPS enabled device enters the advertised area will automatically be notified with their commercial. The idea presented is demonstrated by developing a desktop application using ArcGIS. The application developed shows the working of the proposed idea. As a part of future work the idea can be extended to a more general executable file which can be added to any existing navigation equipment as an additional feature. REFERENCES
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