A Mobile Phone Based Mapping Application for Impala City Case Study: Kampala Capital City of Uganda

Abstract Many people in Uganda and abroad are gaining interest in coming to Kampala; this is due to the high rate of growth and development of Kampala city. These newcomers are unfamiliar with Kampala city and fail to locate various places of interest or destination, so navigation of Kampala suburbs like Ntinda Kamwokya, Kololo etc and other places of interests is not efficient. Currently, there are yahoo and Google maps which are inefficient because users must be connected to the internet using computers on network or sophisticated mobile phones using Bluetooth and infrared. These are expensive and unavailable to common people. Mobile phone based mapping application could be the best solution, since most of these people have mobile phones that are portable and can be used anywhere at any time to view Kampala map. The intent of this project was to develop a mobile phone based mapping application that can aid java enabled mobile phone users in real time map navigation of Kampala city. The various fact-finding methods were used to carry out detailed study about Mobile applications and the tools used in Mobile applications. The techniques used to achieve the general objective of the project-included, existing documenlation and interviews. Data collected using above methodologies was analyzed with use cases and sequence diagrams in order to come up with functional and non functional requirements of the application. The map was drawn in SVGT format suitable to run on constrained mobile devices and thus SVGT consumes less memory, can easily be re-sized, without distortion or loosing quality and searchable as opposed to Raster graphics. The application was implemented using Java programming Language with the help of NetBeans IDE, wireless toolkit, Map drawing tools (Adobe Illustrator and Ikivo Animator) Testing was carried out to ensure that the results are in conformance with the user expectations and technical specifications. The application was validated to ensure that the data inserted into application satisfies pre determined formats or complies with defined input criteria.