Graves in the Digital Realm
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Aalborg University Copenhagen Aalborg University Copenhagen A. C. Meyers Vænge 15 2450, Copenhagen SV M.Sc. Geoinformatics Master Thesis Title: Graves in the digital realm - Have you ever wondered where a Smartphone Development for Cemetery Exploration historical person is buried? Or have you ever gotten yourself lost at a cemetery Project Period: looking for a specific grave? The project at February 1st to June 13th, 2013 hand presents at solution to this problem Submission date: in the form of a geoinformatic system June 13th, 2013 using a native Android application as frontend. Project Supervisor: Thomas Balstrøm At first the access of data regarding the location of buried persons is discussed in order to get an understanding of the possibilities for developing a service solving the before mentioned issues. Group members: This discussion is used as the starting point to plan, build and test a service that can guide cemetery sightseers to Mathias Kofoed Poulsen historical persons' graves, display Student number: 20082672 additional information about them, and in general be used to explore a selected cemetery. Peter Christian von Westphal Thomsen This report documents the work that was Student number: 20082679 put into the project including structuring the project through project management, Printed copies: 4 developing and designing the underlying Number of pages: 116 system, and testing the initial prototypes Number of appendixes: 11 through several usability tests. Copyright © 2013. This report and attached material cannot be published without the authors’ written acceptance PREFACE This Master Thesis was written during the 4rd semester as the conclusion of the M.Sc. Geoinformatics program at Aalborg University, and is rated at 30 ECTS points. The Master Thesis, from now on mentioned as the report, is one of two key elements of a project, the other being a geoinformatic system, also mentioned as the product or service with an Android application, as frontend. Use of the system is illustrated throughout the report and in addition three video examples have been produced: http://youtu.be/OKz84XqJtfo, http://youtu.be/cta5hbOAWuI and http://youtu.be/byhppB9JYKs. The project group who made the project consists of Mathias Kofoed Poulsen and Peter Christian von Westphal Thomsen. During the project period, the consulting firm Atkins, has provided guidance in the initial concept and used development technology of the Android application. Associate professor Thomas Balstrøm at University of Aalborg has been supervisor during the project period which ran from February 1st 2013 to June 13th 2013. The project group would like to thank Atkins for allowing us to use their office space while programming. Furthermore we would like to thank Sofie Gjedde-Simonsen, Daniel Ossipoff Jensen, Bente Kilhof, Barbara Joos, Erik Bach, Gitte Lundinge, Birgitte Foghmoes, Brian Worm Jensen, Bent Nielsen, Vagn Andersen, Anne Lise Thomsen, Morten Fuglsang and Thomas Balstrøm for their support and counselling during the project period. REPORT STRUCTURE AND METHOD OF RESEARCH The present report is divided into four stages, representing the stages that the project as a whole has gone through during the entire project period. These stages are inspired by (Larson and Gray 2011) and consist of a defining stage, a planning stage, an executing stage, and a closing stage. Figure 1 The flow between the four stages of the project. (Larson and Gray 2011) As it can be seen in Figure 1, the individual stages during the project period do not typically end completely before the next stage is started, but instead follow a pattern where the main focus in the project period changes to a new stage while the previous stage is still being finished. This natural flow in between the stages of the project period is difficult to capture in a report, and instead all elements belonging to one specific stage are sorted and presented before moving on to the next stage. By doing this, it is easier for the reader to understand the process that the project has gone through, but at the same time this means that the chapters presented are not necessarily in chronological order, compared to when the described processes were executed. The defining stage presents the research and considerations that went into specifying the focus area and problem statement of the project. Because much of the acquired information was not available in books or on websites, the collection of data and information for this stage was done primarily through interviews and mail correspondence with cemetery managers, culture centres and relevant authorities. These personal accounts are used to understand the use and limitations of existing solutions, which again are used to define the purpose of the project. The Planning stage explains how the project group prepared for the development of the product. This was done by researching on relevant theory for the project such as programming, usability tests as well as project management. Since this stage had a heavily theoretical approach, the majority of the sources here come from theoretical text books such as Project Management (Larson and Gray 2011), Interaction Design (Rogers, Sharp and Preece 2002), and Usability (Gregersen and Wisler-Poulsen 2009), in order to have the backbone of knowledge needed for the stages to come. The Executing stage documents how the product itself was built and evaluated, and how the researched theory was put into use for the development of the product. Because this stage focused on hands on developing and programming, it was difficult to find solutions to specific problems in text books, and instead internet forums for development such as stackoverflow.com, postgresql.org, and gis.stachexchange.com were used as primary sources. Here questions regarding development could be found to understand and solve issues. The Closing stage sums up on the project, and is used to answer questions asked during the process. Because of the nature of this stage, no additional information is provided, and as such no new sources are presented, but instead knowledge gathered through the three previous stages are used to evaluate on the project as a whole. SYSTEM DATA SOURCES In the developed system, data from different sources was used. The network in the system was built by using FOT data from the Danish Geodata Agency. In addition Aarhus and Copenhagen municipality were so kind to deliver burial plot data for their cemeteries. READING INSTRUCTIONS This section contains information of how references and specific definitions are used throughout the report. REFERENCES In this report, The Chicago Manual of Style edition 15 author/date citation style has been chosen as documentation system and the sources are cited as follows: ([author] [publishing year]) The cited sources are fully described in a list of references in the bibliography section. Not all figures have a reference, the ones without were created by the authors. Certain information like images or references to websites in general are in the in the text only mentioned by the internet address and are not shown in the bibliography section. The guideline given from Aalborg University, concerning plagiarism of making references if six or more contiguous words are used from a source is not followed in respect of code references. The reason for this is that certain functions in an Android application are only possible using multiple contiguous words, so only when several lines have been used a reference is given. All tables, diagrams and pictures are labelled as figures and are numbered continuously throughout the text. Appendixes are numbered continuously using letters. These elements are in the report referred to as follows: Figure: See Figure 1 Appendix: See Appendix A Examples of code are given several places throughout the report, the readability of these code snippets have been improved by the use of colour. Different languages and scripts have different notation, and the same way of colouring the code cannot be used for all. Notepad++'s use of colour coding different languages and scripts has been used in this report. DEFINITIONS Burial plot: Is the smallest identification unit the cemeteries use to identify a piece of land in the cemeteries. This can be a unit for a collection of graves for a whole family or just for a single person. Grave: Is the physical place where a person is buried. There are several places throughout the report where both words can be used to define the general area that is being referred to. In these cases the word grave will be used, as the main focus of this project is the position of individual graves and the persons buried at the specific locations. TABLE OF CONTENTS Defining Stage .............................................................................................................................................................. 1 1 Introduction ......................................................................................................................................................... 2 2 Problem Evaluation........................................................................................................................................... 3 2.1 The Existing Market of Graves in the Digital Realm ..................................................................................... 3 2.2 Influence of the Society ........................................................................................................................................