CALBUDDY- A SHARED
MOBILE/WEB BASED
CALENDAR
AIAD 8803 PROJECT PROPOSAL
PROJECT MEMBERSNISARG KADAKIA
SAURIN KADAKIA
ROHIT KUMBHAR
ANKIT SHAH
MOTIVATION AND OBJECTIVE:
In today's world, people operate in a more hectic and pressured environment than ever
before. Additional demands are being placed on their competence, cooperation skills,
cooperation volume and overall efficiency, at the same time as personal assistants and
personal secretaries are becoming a rare species even in the highest ranks of management.
The main drawback of a PC based calendar is the apparent lack of mobility. In an
organization, the mobile need of the users have been poorly catered for by e.g. print-outs
from the calendar system or traditional paper calendars, which must then be manually
synchronized to the groupware calendar when back at the desktop. In our project we
propose to incorporate a shared mobile calendar which is platform independent, i.e. being
able to use the calendar information with a number of devices, easily synchronizable to
each other. E.g. a PDA might be used while in meetings, a desktop PC while in the office
and a mobile phone during leisure time. Also, this would serve to eliminate the problem
of using multiple parallel calendars and suffering from missed appointments and double
bookings due to it. Integrating the calendar with other applications such as email, twitter
streams, etc. would also make it convenient for the users to schedule their activities
accordingly. For e.g. when you send an email fixing an appointment, this information
should be automatically entered in the shared calendar. Another potential benefit of a
mobile shared calendar would be extending the concept of location based alerts. For e.g.
useful data, recommendations, warnings, etc. about a particular location on that particular
day and probably at that particular time. Social networking and coordination is also a
major reason and benefit to participate in a groupware calendar system. For e.g. sharing
schedule, location information with selected friends and subscribing to alerts on possible
meet up. Amongst several other advantages that arise from shared mobile calendars can
include matchmaking for consenting friends, incorporation of a friend's map-mashup of
location data with Google Maps, querying the latest locations of friends, etc. To conclude,
the identified benefits from as follows•
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•
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Synchronization of calendars on different devices
Easy availability of backward archive and future calendar over several years.
Ubiquitous availability of calendar
Social networking
Integration with other day to day applications.
RELATED WORK:
Our project is mainly inspired by Google calendars. It has made sharing and organizing
of important day to day activities easy. Using Google Calendar, you can add events and
invitations effortlessly, share with friends and family or keep things to yourself, and
search across the web for events you might enjoy. It has been a breakthrough of sorts,
gaining popularity among the masses which is clearly seen by its ever-increasing usage.
Rave Wireless is another application deployed on mobile platforms. It is a turnkey mobile
phone program targeted mainly at the university based audience. It includes features like
alerts during emergencies to enable student/faculty to take quick action. The closest
functionality that it has to our project is the formation of groups, clubs etc. It is similar in
that we too allow sharing of calendars among a private community of sorts.
Another interesting application deployed on mobile phones is Buddy Beacon. It
implements a location-based service. It allows your GPS enabled cell phone to post your
location and see the location of friends around you. This emulates our functionality of
allowing users to share their locations during different parts of the day and giving alerts
on possible meet-ups whilst near a friend’s location.
However, integration of calendars as a web/mobile service has not been implemented
before to the best of our knowledge. Applications developed have been either dedicated
only as a web service or only on the mobile platforms. Hence, it is our endeavor to
integrate these two platforms and provide device-independence to our users.
PROPOSED WORK:
•
We are trying to integrate various public location and schedule based data points
such that in addition to our information being available to ourselves, it should be
made available to a select group of people without much effort. In this context, we
are planning to:
o Create a social network:
Create a trusted invite/confirmation based network of friends which agree
to share data amongst themselves. The detailed tasks are:
Create a user profile.
Add other users as friends.
Create named groups of friends.
o Share location information:
Users should be able to share their location information with
friends.
Users should be able to post location based text to the central
server.
o Share schedule information:
Users should be able to share their schedule with their friends so that we
can provide a combination of event and location based services. The tasks
involved are:
Calendar sharing.
Integrate with Google calendar.
Share with friend groups.
Mobile client (on Android platform and/or windows mobile platform)
Integration with calendars
One click sharing/adding of friends
Update location settings
o How will we evaluate its success:
It is hard to evaluate the "success" of such a scheme because of the fairly
new domain of the services. Presence of other players in the same arena
(e.g. www.uLocate.com) can be provided as a validation point for this
line of thought.
o
Novelty of the project:
Although social networking is not a new concept any more, we still have
to find a constructive usage of the networks that we create. Professional
networks may serve referential purposes but sharing data which is
immediately useful would be adding more value to these networks. The
new topics that we wish to cover in this project are:
Mobile social networking
Location based updates e.g. possible meetup opportunity when two
friends are in the proximity zone.
Mobile client development on the Android platform
If possible, location based audio/video blogging, a concept
extending mGraffiti.
Integrating multiple calendars on mobile and sharing it with your
network.
ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN
o
Server Architecture
o
Mobile Client Architecture:
PROPOSED TECHNOLOGIES TO BE USED:
1. Android SDK for mobile client
2. Java based application for Simple Data Management and Data Analysis
3. MySQL database
4. Service oriented / XML based interaction with 3rd party providers
PLAN OF ACTION:
EVALUATION AND TESTING:
Evaluation and testing will be divided into the following test caseso
o
o
Core test cases (Web):
Creating profiles
User should be able to create a profile, add another profiles as
friends, create a group of friends and assign data settings to them.
Update your location manually.
User should have the capability of updating his/her location
through the web interface.
Turning off location update
User should be able to turn off his/her location updates through the
web interface
User should be able to add external online calendars (e.g. Google
Calendar through ICAL) to his event repository
User should be able to create entries into the event repositories
User should be able to share his event repository with friends.
View friends map. Overlay depicting friend position and last
update timestamp.
Core test cases (Mobile client)
Add friend to a particular group
Viewing friends' location
Turning on/off location update
Leave text message for friends for a given location
Non-Functional test cases:
Testing for scalability
Security
REFERENCES:
[1] Anna Sell, Pirkko Walden, " Mobile Digital Calendars: An Interview Study",
Proceedings of the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences-2006.
[2] http://www.ravewireless.com/campus.shtml
[3] http://www.google.com/intl/en/googlecalendar/overview.html
[4] http://www.ulocate.com/buddybeacon.php
[5] http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/cache/papers/cs2/545/http:zSzzSzwww.dcs.gla.ac.ukzSz~ste
phenzSzpaperszSzIHMHCI2001_Walker.pdf/diary-in-the-sky.pdf
[6] http://www.sci.utu.fi/projects/maantiede/kurssit/MAAN7663_GIS_and_Society/
lectures/3_navigation_121107.pdf