FieldJournal : a mobile data collection and mapping applications for the pocketPCs

Abstract

FieldJournal is a mobile data collection and mapping application designed for the PocketPC brand of PDAs. It was built as an investigation into combining the data collection process and the mapping process of community planners into one piece of software, while striving to solve the specific problems of workers at the North End Outreach Network. FieldJournal has four main sections which allow the user to view data about households or individuals or to map the data. The implementation of FieldJournal follows the Model-View-Controller paradigm, separating the user interface components from the backend details. Because FieldJournal is built on the Java 2 Mobile Edition platform, many trade-offs were made in order to increase the speed of the program while still maintaining its usability. In the end, FieldJournal had only limited success in combining the two processes, as many of the more complicated mapping functions could not be included.