LOCATION BASED MOBILE DATING SERVICE
ARUN PONNUSAMY ABHISHEAK IYER DEEPAK SWATHI GANGISETTY
ABSTRACT
The aim of this project is to develop a mobile location based dating service to
which the users can subscribe to find and meet prospective dates in a given
region. The user can log onto the service through the mobile phone and the user
will be shown a list of all available users within a specified proximity range to a
public location. This project gathers location details from the GPS and leverages
Google Maps API to perform location based analysis. This project uses Google's
Android as the underlying Mobile Platform for Application Development. The
users will have to register their mobile phone number and create a profile online
displaying their details and indicating their interests and preferences. Once the
user logs into the Mobile Location-Based Dating Service through the mobile, the
users’ location details are captured and updated in the database. Now the user can
look up others using this service within a specified proximity range to a public
location. The user can contact a prospective Date and negotiate the appointment
through text chat or by calling. The caller's mobile number could be obfuscated if
necessary based on his/ her privacy settings. The users’ locations would be
updated periodically. This project also addresses some of the privacy issues like
optional mobile number obfuscation, disclosure of only the range proximity to a
public location and not the actual location coordinates to others users.
MOTIVATION
As the world turns towards Web 2.0 and with Mobile phones becoming all
pervasive, Location Based Services has emerged as the next big thing and
Telecom and GPS companies are already competing for their market share in this
Lucrative industry. With data becoming increasingly available and accessible to
users of Location Based Services the biggest concerns are that of Privacy and
safety. The EU and US Government agencies are becoming increasingly
concerned and paranoid about the Misuse of data collected due to LBS
technologies either by the operator or the subscriber
We have a plethora of applications on the web that enable people to locate and
contact people within a particular radius. Our project aims at developing a
Location Based dating service to be deployed on the soon to be released Android
by Google Inc. Our focus is to create an application that would enable people to
locate another person based on a host of criteria while at the same time preserve
anonymity. We also seek to provide a means for which any two individuals who
want to date , to be able to negotiate a common place of interest by browsing
simultaneously on Google Maps and also constantly update each other of the
progress that each of them is making towards the negotiated area. Thus we ensure
both of them keep up their commitment without actually relaying coordinate
information to each other.
Yet another motivation has been the Android developer Challenge posed by the
Open Handset Alliance (http://code.google.com/android/index.html). This would
be a great platform for us to present our application and further the scope of this
project.
OBJECTIVE
In this project we intend to build a prototype system of the Mobile Location
Based Dating Service over the Google Android Mobile platform. Some of the
main features of this project are user profile creation, proximity range search
from a public location, knock a user for a date, mobile number obfuscation and
non-disclosure of actual location coordinates.
This diagram describes the overall functioning of the system.
MOBILE POSITIONING
NETWORK
LBS DATING SERVER
DATABASE STORAGE
THE INTERNET
SUBSCRIBERS
GPRS NETWORK
ANDROID BASED
MOBILE
RELATED WORK
Currently there is a great interest and motivation in the developer community to
use LBS technology to develop proximity dating applications. Some of them
have focussed their efforts on locating a matching user as easy as possible ,
others have focussed their efforts on location privacy thanks to restrictive cyber
laws and government regulations.
Some related applications include Aka-Aki (Germany based), Imity, MeetMoi,
MobiLuck(Paris based), Dodgeball, Meetro. A few applications such as Aka-Aki,
Imity and mobiluck used bluetooth to locate users and transmit information. But
the idea failed or it didn't take off due to critical density/mass problems.
Dodgeball, Meetro are location aware messenger applications without any mobile
support. One another popular application that is rapidly gaining user mass and
acquired by Google is www.jaiku.com. Jaiku is more like a twitter based
application with location aware information.
Despite the lack of momentum, as mentioned above it is anticipated that LBS
would be a compelling business opportunity for both operators and application
developers and service providers. As a result there are still many applications
under various stages of development.
REQUIRED RESOURCES

MySQL Database : The profile and location based information should be
maintained and indexed in a database customized to store spatial data.
Also source level update reduction/control should be addressed
intelligently at the database level ( Ex LIRA)

Apache Webserver : A web server to deliver web pages and the
infrastructure/interface for the application.

Google Android : The Application will be build using the Google Android
Framework.

Google API's : Most of Google API's will be considered that would aid the
overall application.
PROPOSED WORK
We have categorized the entire project into four main modules. A brief
description of each is as follows .
DATABASE IMPLEMENTATION
We will use the Database to store user account and login details, user profile
information, the location information, user preferences etc. We would like to use
an open source Relational Database – MySQL to implement the relations and
schemas. The development would be mostly in Java and hence we would
leverage JDBC technology to communicate with the MySQL database. The
Login Details table will store the User’s Login Username, Password and Mobile
Number using which he will use this service. The Location table will store details
the user’s Mobile Number, the current Latitude and Longitude details. The User
profile table will store the user’s Mobile Number, Screen Name, Gender, D.O.B,
Address, City, Profession, Interests, Height, Weight, Relationship Status etc. We
would be adding more table as it deems fit and depending upon the extra features
that we would want to add.
LOCATION INFORMATION
The location details can be gathered by the mobile using the GPS system. In our
implementation, the application running on the Android Emulator would take the
help of the Android SDK LBS packages android.location and
com.google.android.maps to get location details and store them and also to give a
map view for a region to display the number of users closer to a particular public
location.
DATING SERVICE MODULE
The dating application runs on a web server and is displayed using the GUI . We
would create an easy to navigate GUI to allow users to interact with the dating
service. This will allows users log in, subscribe and generally have all the same
experiences of a real dating service. The dating application is to be written in
Java and implemented using Apache Tomcat Servlet technology. The pages of
the application are displayed to the user on a Web browser using HTML and
Servlet Technology.
INTERACTIVE USER INTERFACE MODULE:
We would devote considerable effort to design a GUI that is easy to navigate
taking into consideration the limitations that a mobile phone poses on browsing
as opposed to the easy navigation on the World Wide Web on a computer. Our
GUI would comprise of a mash up of independent applications such as the
Google maps, an internal chat application or the ‘Libjingle’ API to connect to
Gtalk , The dating module .
TIMELINE
1. Feb 15 - Completion of the proposal .
2. Feb 28 - Spatial Database Design.
3. Mar 15 - Location Masking and Privacy Policy design
4. Mar 21 - Know more about Google Android and Map APIs
5. Mar 28 - Build a sample Database
6. Apr 5 - UI prototype with user enable privacy settings
7. Apr 11 - Fix Bugs and code cleanup & documentation
8. Apr 14 - Demo and code submission
FUTURE WORK
We have embarked on this project with a foresight that this application has
tremendous potential for further development. Some of these have been listed
below.
* The user profile can be synced up with the existing profiles on Social
Networking sites like Orkut or Facebook.
* Rating a User profile by others Users.
* Having a Dating Wish list to be used to locate stores where they would be
available to be displayed to one's prospective date.
* To maintain an Ignore List, Crush List and Hot List.
* Use this service to negotiate a group meeting for people who share common
interests.
* We also propose a revenue model for this project through advertisements that
are based on details from the user's wish list, hobbies and interests.
REFERENCES
[1] Privacy-Preserving Location-based Services for Mobile Users in Wireless
Networks. Sheng Zhong, Li Li , Yanbin Liu, and Yang Richard Yang. Yale
Computer Science Technical Report YALEU/DCS/TR-1297. July 2004
[2] D. L. Lee, M. Zhu and H. Hu. "When location-based services meet databases."
Mobile Information System, Volume 1, Number 2, 2005.
[3] http://code.google.com/android/
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_dating
[5] www.mobi-date.com
[6] http://www.onlinedatingmagazine.com/onlinedatingreviews.html