Database support for mobile route planning systems

The impact of tele and mobile information technology will increase the need for fast access to geodata significantly in the next years. However, hitherto many problems concerning the wireless access to geodata e.g. to be used in route planning clients are not yet solved. Beside transaction management the requirements of route planning systems to GIS technology mainly concern the modelling and management of graph-based geodata. New challenges to meet are the efficient storage of routes and the supply of location-based database queries. However, today's first commercial database management systems for mobile devices do not support spatial database queries. In this article we collect requirements and present a first implementation prototype of a mobile route planning system focusing on the support of spatial database queries. First experiences with a mobile bicycle route planning client coupled with a database management system are presented. We show that at the server side the computation and storage of different route types as well as the generation of routes under consideration of semantic information like tourist information or roads with certain points of interest should make up the main functionality of such a system. The mobile client should supply database support for the location-based visualization of routes and an offline data management of route data.