Smart Information Campus

About	Concept	Example	History	Providers	Regions	Smart Information Campus

The first reference implementation of Digital Graffiti is a new location-based information- and communication system at the campus of the University of Linz. Students as well as lectors and administrative staff should be able to perceive location-based information on the university campus and to place information for other users. Lecture rooms should be marked by smart Digital Graffiti always displaying the current lecture type and times for these rooms. The event management should be able to announce upcoming activities or presentations to the users of this system. Teachers should be able to ad-hoc exchange documents with students just because of their geographical attendance in a lecture room. This reference implementation is called Smart Information Campus and enhances personal networking within the university campus:

Social Networking
— Creation of Communities
— Finding team mates and friends and communicating via click
— Finding persons with special interests
— Finding you own parked car, building driving communities

Learning Networks
— Creation of learning groups and finding group members
— Asking online questions during lessons
— Ad-hoc download of documents during lessons

Scientific Networking
— Digital Graffiti as a research platform
— Business models for LBS
— Digital Aura for exchanging common interests at spatial proximity
— peer-2-peer communication

Organizational Networking
— Navigation (for beginners, visitor navigation system)
— Event management ("Which event is where today?")
— Conference management ("Where is the gala dinner?")
— Maintenance

Smart Information Campus is supposed to integrate several distributed information services available at the university campus to one central information system:

Combination of library system, mensa system, event management, student services, registration and exam system)
Personalized representation for individual students, teachers, guests
Location-based calendar: "Your next lesson is in room 17. Please, consider 5 minutes walk from your current position."
Integration of existing extern systems (e.g. railway)
"Where is my train/bus currently? Do I reach it in time if I start walking now or shall I take the next one?"

The term smartness as the identified unique selling point represents the main focus within the Smart Information campus. Information is primarily supposed to be linked to external systems in order to be enriched with up-to-date data to be displayed to the users.

As an example, Digital Graffiti indicating the position of lecture rooms do not contain a pre-edited text containing the lecture times for a whole semester. Instead, those Digital Graffiti contain smart elements which fetch their data from a remote data basis and are therefore always up-to-date.

Another example may be the so called location-based chat room, i.e. a geographical place for chatting where users automatically participate at spatial proximity. Although the concept behind this room metaphor has not been specified within this short proposal, it should be clear that it also uses smart elements automatically establishing communication channels among the users in a location-based chat room. Whereas the previous example illustrated a smart element with dynamically changing content, this example triggers electronic code, i.e. it interconnects communication channels (executable content).

Digital Aura is a theoretical concept developed at the University of Linz, enabling users whose profile of interest matches somehow (a sophisticated contextual software framework has been developed for this concept) to get in contact when they are spatially close to each other. Digital Graffiti now provides a practical platform to implement this research scenario again using smart elements which evaluate user profiles (i.e. they use the context-framework) at geographical proximity. Thus, Digital Graffiti containing smart elements represents a research platform for scientific work. The consequences in this example reach to the investigation of social aspects within location-based services and are therefore not only relevant for technical sciences but also for social and even juridical issues.