CS297 Proposal

Food Menu Phone Application

Shengyu Li (li.kelly@gmail.com)

/divAdvisor: Dr. Chris Pollett

Description:

My project is to develop a cell phone application that helps people to easily search/upload information about a food item from/to the food database. A similar existing system is Yelp, however, Yelp is based on whole restaurants. Most of the time, people may just know what food they are looking for instead of the restaurants' name. Without knowing any restaurants' names, our food application's search only requires the food's name in order to get the a list of restaurants' information (location, hours, phone number, item's price, etc. ). Another similar application is Google Map, which is searchable for any items with location and output the related brief information(restaurant's name, address, phone number, direction to the restaurant). An advantage of using my food application is the system is not only included the information Google Map provided, but also include any information other users inputted. When an user wants to input a food item, he/she can either upload the item's picture or use a template picture to the server. He/she can also input the rating and comments about the specific food item. With the rating option, my project need to handle how to calculate the rating result according user's input. The option to allow users to input a zip code is useful when people are planing to go to an unfamiliar city to have food. Our system needs to calculate a list of restaurant that are a geographically short distance from the user by cities' name or zip code. Based on the phone's capability, the system also needs to figure out the physical phone location. This requires the phone to receive the GPS signal and covert them into current physical phone address. In this way, users can search/upload the local restaurants' food without inputting the current location.

Schedule:

Week 1-3: 08/24/2009 - 09/12/2009	Study how to write phone application and write code in the emulator.
Week 4-6: 09/13/2009 - 10/03/2009	Deliverable 1: Write a test program to receive the GPS signal and covert it into region of area code
Week 7-8: 10/04/2009 - 10/17/2009	Deliverable 2: Write a test program to obtain a list of zip codes which have geographic short distance to the given zip code
Week 9-12: 10/18/2009 - 11/14/2009	Deliverable 3: Design food item database and user interface
Week 13-14: 11/15/2009 - 11/28/2009	Deliverable 4: Construct food item' table with real restaurant's menu
Week 15-17: 11/29/2009 - 12/15/2009	Deliverable 5: CS297 report done

Deliverables:

The full project will be done when CS298 is completed. The following will be done by the end of CS297:

1. Write a test program to obtain current physical location from GPS signal

2. Write a test program to get a list of zip codes from server which is related to the given zip code

3. Design my own food items' database/User interface

4. Construct food items' table

5. CS297 report

References:

Google Maps API Concepts. Retrieved August 27, 2009 from Google web site: http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/index.php.

Leena Rao. (April 2, 2009). Citing Websites. In Yelp Focuses on Mobile, New And Improved iPhone App Coming Soon. Retrieved August 27, 2009 from techcrunch web site: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/04/02/yelp-focuses-on-mobile-new-and-improved-iphone-app-coming-soon/

Geographic Queries on Google App Engine. Retrieved August 27, 2009 from MetaCarta Labs web site: http://labs.metacarta.com/blog/27.entry/geographic-queries-on-google-app-engine/

[1989] The Geographic Database – Logically Continuous and Physically Discrete.Peter Aronson. 1989.

[1993] Geographic Regions: A New Composite GIS Feature Type. Jan van Roessel and David Pullar. 1993