Abstract—The primary focus of our project was to investigate and build the distributed architecture of a mobile GIS (geographic information system) application. The purpose of this application would be for displaying useful information on a college campus based on the specific geographic location of our user. Information could include things such as location based events, maps, or other pertinent information that our user may find helpful or informative. A database design that offered acceptable levels of flexibility, ease of use, and quick deployment was explored and ultimately NoSQL MongoDB was chosen. We aimed to implement a database schema specifically geared towards storage of geographic data and MongoDB’s flexible schema design fulfilled that requirement. Through the use of MongoDB we also aimed to investigate the tradeoffs of using NoSQL instead of SQL in regards to querying performance and ease of design/development. We explored modern technologies to implement geographical objects (polygons, points, polylines) that were to contain real-time information about geographical objects around our user (buildings, floors, classrooms). And we implemented a Node.js server to retrieve data from our MongoDB according to our user’s current location and then handle that GIS information using the Google Maps API. Our project brought us to the conclusion that for the purposes of easy scalability, quick startup development, and ease of creating flexible data models NoSQL databases like MongoDB were preferable for our project over more conventional SQL databases [1]. In addition, we proved out the usefulness of a GIS application geared towards college students to provide useful campus information based on the student’s location.
Index Terms—GIS, MongoDB, node.js, NoSQL.
The authors are with School of Computer Science, Kean University, Union, NJ 07083, USA (email: rodrjon1@kean.edu, malgapoa@kean.edu, quickja@kean.edu, chuang@kean.edu).
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Cite:Jonathan Rodriguez, Anthony Malgapo, Jacob Quick, and Chung-yu Huang, "Distributed Architecture of Mobile GIS Application Using NoSQL Database," International Journal of Information and Electronics Engineering vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 156-160, 2017.
