1. UAA Self Guided PDA Tour Edward Wickham CS470 Project Final Presentation Spring 2004

2. Purpose Provide new students and parents with an alternative/supplement to Orientation tours Explore technologies for using a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) in a Self Guided Tour

3. Requirements Begin and go anywhere (Active Tour) Use PDA Format – Palm, Pocket PC Deliver to UAA-owned and personal PDAs Include Visual and Text Navigation Provide information –Physical (Buildings, Landmarks, Services) –Contextual (Departments, anecdotes, etc.)

4. Project Estimates The Project Uncertainty Principle

5. Analysis Questions What is the nature of the data? –Effectively static BUT! –Presentation formats are dynamic (Screen size, color depth, etc.) –Data categories are inter-related (Buildings, Departments, etc.)

6. Final, Flexible Solution AvantGo Channel and its PDA based web browser provides for a ready made presentation and delivery platform Database provides for easy content maintenance Coldfusion application provides for consistent page presentation and dynamic content generation. Support for new devices is achieved by adding additional graphics, changing one file (agHTTPheaders.cfm) to map the device to the graphics directory. Support for the ColdFusion application can be provided by UAA IT Department

7. Site Organization Main Locater Where am I? Chancellor’s Welcome Map Level 1 Map Level 2 Map Detail Buildings Landmark Department Summary Help Buildings Landmark Department Detail Common Site Navigational Controls

8. AvantGo Review

9. Common Page Architecture Application.cfm agHTTPheader.cfm Menu bar Content Data Extraction Layer Uses Color Depth and Screen Resolution data in HTTP Header to determine graphics directory Uses URL variables to determine data detail level Uses data to dynamically construct content as well as new URLs

10. Database Schema

11. Map Detail Buildings - Departments - Services - Points of Interest - Information - Zoom out - Home - Map to East Map to North Buildings, Departments, Services and Points of Interest Links Display information specific to displayed map

12. Summary and Detail Pages

13. Lessons Learned Never oversimplify requirements. Even with relatively static information, dynamic presentation is always better when dealing with large amounts of similarly formatted information. Presentation on a PDA is more difficult than it looks

14. Conclusion Delivered prototype Campus Tour on PDA Used AvantGo Channel and PDA based browser Provided a database and a ColdFusion web-based application to drive a dynamically generated Campus Tour