Implementing A Mobile GIS Application Based On ArcGIS For IOS

With the development of mobile terminals as well as wireless communication technologies, a new type of consumer electronic products called personal smart mobile devices (i.e. smart phone, tablet PC, etc.) have been serving a growing large number of customers. Meantime, the improvement of the operating system software (e.g., iOS, Android, Windows Phone, and Symbian) and hardware performance enables the existing smart mobile devices to run complex mobile applications. Therefore, these mobile terminals become the new carrier of geographic information system (GIS), and a lot of professional and public mobile GIS applications based on mobile devices have arisen. Meanwhile, lots of secondary development platforms for mobile GIS are launched by the major GIS vendors actively to promote the development of mobile GIS applications. However, these secondary development platforms were newly introduced, thus there still exists some problems and the development methods to be studied. Therefore, it becomes essential to investigate systematically the development process and relevant key technologies for different mobile operating systems and mobile GIS development platforms.iOS is a mobile operating system developed and distributed by Apple Inc. It only supports Apple devices such as iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch and Apple TV. In this paper, a development method of mobile GIS based on ArcGIS for iOS, which is a mobile GIS secondary development platform from ESRI, was studied. Firstly, this paper describes the concept, composition and characteristics of mobile GIS, and investigates the current research situation and development status in Mobile GIS. The foundation knowledge of iOS application development, including iOS, iOS SDK, the iOS Developer Program and the local database SQLite, are also summarized. Secondly, based on previous analysis, the paper focused on the key technology of mobile GIS development based on ArcGIS for iOS, which include spatial orientation, the publishing and loading of map data and the interaction of client and server-side database. Finally, a case study of East China Normal University Digital Campus system based on iPhone is conducted in this study. The development process of mobile GIS based on ArcGIS for iOS is introduced in detail. Some interesting and useful functions, including spatial orientation, building query,360-degree panorama of hot spots, the display of map layers and features information classification, are implemented in the digital campus system. The case study demonstrates that the development methodology this paper presented is feasible and effective. The key technology and developmentprocedure the paper introduced would be helpful for follow-up application development.