| 4. In which ways is the initiative creative and innovative?
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The implementation was done on the basis of available spatial data infrastructures in the province of Upper Austria; on the other hand, the available resources for each platform SDKs and development environments have been used for app development.
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| 5. Who implemented the initiative and what is the size of the population affected by this initiative?
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For many years there has been a close cooperation between the Department of Geoinformation, the University of Linz and the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg. The geo-experts of the Department of Geoinformation are in demand both as lecturers and supervisors of project studies, master and diploma theses.
Also, the submitted project "DORIS mobile" is one of these cooperation projects between public management and science. The DORIS iOS app is part of a thesis by Mr. Thomas Svitil at the Institute for Data Processing in the Social and Economic Sciences at the University of Linz, the Android app as part of a DORIS internship of Mr. Simon Klein, student of "Mobile Computing" University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg and the web app as an DORIS in-house development by Mr. Josef Mitgutsch and Mr. Christian Holzinger. Moreover, the Windows 8 App was programmed by another student at FH Hagenberg, Mr. Felix Auer.
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| 6. How was the strategy implemented and what resources were mobilized?
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Once the province of Upper Austria use software products from ESRI, Inc. (CA, www.esri.com) , it was natural to build up the developments on these products. Core elements of the developments are the "ArcGIS Runtime SDK for smartphones and tablets." With these SDKs you´re able to build mapping applications for different platforms with additional features such as Geosearch, geocoding, GPS usage, etc.
"DORIS Mobile" is not thought as a competitor to existing mobile Mapviewers or apps (Google Maps, ....); "DORIS mobile" wants to be a leader in official and reliable content: current, accurate, complete, diverse, regional, .. simple and sympathetic.
The aim is to provide content which did not exist previously in existing mobile applications; and no one knows the specific details of our home country as well as we.
For internal users of the apps and other beneficiaries (eg municipalities), it should also be possible to provide additional information (eg property owners). This would provide the ability to field stuff for retrieving current location based information from the spatial databases in the central office.
Subsequently, it should be possible to capture this data locally and update the databases.
There was no separate budget for this project. Also, no additional staff in office. The students have aligned their projects and theses on this project. Therefore, the whole project was very cheap.
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| 7. Who were the stakeholders involved in the design of the initiative and in its implementation?
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Users enjoy a wealth of maps on the subjects of agriculture and forestry, regional planning, environmental protection and nature conservation, transport, water, arts and culture, etc. which are available. These data can be combined with different background maps such as highly accurate orthophotos, area maps, and even historical maps. Of course, on the individual topics further information can also be queried.
At the "International GIS Day 2012" event - a global open day at institutions which use Geographic Information Systems – we were able to test the new DORIS apps in detail in different workshops around 500 pupils. A major target group of DORIS for many years has been the teachers of geography in higher education. Therefore, there is also a close contact for teacher training. DORIS data and applications are available in the Upper Austrian schools in high demand, so many suggestions from the geography teachers flow in the development of this applications.
Until today, both the iOS app and the ANDROID app has been downloaded and installed about 15.000 times. The feedback and reviews are very positive
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| 8. What were the most successful outputs and why was the initiative effective?
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The aim was to implement Phase I of the project "DORIS mobile" with "evolutionary prototyping". This method of software development has so far offered for this project, because by early feedback of the internal users, quick results were to be expected and therefore the tuning of the app development could be facilitated between different platforms. Therefore, there was very early an executable prototype for testing, which ultimately "matured" to a product version 1.
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| 9. What were the main obstacles encountered and how were they overcome?
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The approach aims to make already available the geodata at www.doris.at for mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Both "look and feel" of the application and the user interface should be coordinated across platforms. Similarly, the available functionalities and content. A very difficult task, because the SDKs used for different platforms do not have the same level of development. Therefore certain features had to be omitted in favor of "equality" of apps.
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