Abstract:

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 can be searched 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.

CS297 Results

• Write a test program to obtain current physical location from GPS signal, so that the phone application can use Google Maps.
• Write a test program to get a list of zip codes from server which is related to the given zip code, so the the phone application get a list of zip code information for the given zip code.
• Design my own food items' database/User interface
• Construct food items' table
• CS297 report

Proposed Schedule

Key Deliverables:

• Software
  • Implement a web server in order to store and retrieve food/restaurants information into a database.
  • Implement the feature of downloading/uploading picture from the php server and the phone. Besides, store the picture's information to the database.
  • Develop an application for the photo to get/put information from the server and display on the phone.
  • Implement the functionality of displaying multiple locations on the Google Map from the phone. In this way, the user can view different restaurant locations appear on the map.
  • Implement the feature of calculating the distance from the current location to a restaurant's address.
  • Implement the feature of user's rating and comments so that users can rate and input comments to a food item and its restaurant.
• Report
  • Detail description of software deliverables.
  • Final report and presentation.

Innovations and Challenges

• The project required to implement a server program as well as an phone application running from the clients. From the server side, a database is needed to be retrieved data and uploaded data from the phone.
• The client side is the phone application. It uses the most updated Google Maps API and GPS features to display and location the current location as well as the restaurant's information. The features includes how to display the current location, multiple restaurants' locations, path/distance between restaurants' location to the user's location. My solution is to get Google Maps kml output and analyze in order to retrieve the location information.
• The phone application also allow users to input rating, pictures and/or comments information about any specific food items.

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