The Anatomy of the Trailblazers System

Inhalt:
Since 2002 Ubiquitous Computing is one of the key activities in the Computer Science Dept. of the HAW Ham-burg. The subjects considered are reaching from technical projects like indoor-positioning systems to location-based architectures and real life rescue scenarios. One of the achievements so far is the construction of an inter-active meeting room (CSCW) which could also operate as a primary control unit. Since this year the HAW-Hamburg in conjunction with the department of media technique is addressing extended problems towards the development of innovative concepts on the basis of pervasive games while incorporating body monitoring techniques. Due to this extension of the problem scope towards ambient intelligence there is also an integration of the Usability-Lab as a successful part of the Computer Science Dept. Trailblazers is a project created in this context. The concept was a successful participant of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup 2006. Geographical data is collected in a community driven way using controllable position tracking via GPS. All collected data is aggregated on a central server. The focus here lies on a seamless integration (user centered design) between users and the central server. There should be no manual intervention to integrate the data (minimalization of user disruption). With the help of pattern recognition the collected geographical data is transformed into trails which can be used for routing. Additionally the system is able to categorize the collected trails through the application of filtering techniques (e.g. user profiles), enabling it to discover barrier free trails. Through the application of routing algorithms Trailblazers provides a navigation system for mobility impaired people. This paper presents the anatomy of the actual Trailblazers system which will be online this autumn.