Mobile Campus Assistant is a 6-month, £40,000 project funded by JISC to create mobile applications for students at the University of Bristol. It will develop native apps for Android and iPhone to provide location-sensitive information to students, such as bus times, library hours, and wireless hotspot locations. The project harvested and aggregated data from various university sources and made it available through a RESTful API to power the mobile apps. It faced challenges with incomplete or inaccurate underlying data, and hopes to engage other universities to further the open source project.

1. Mobile Campus Assistant
Mike Jones (mike.a.jones@bristol.ac.uk)
Institute for Learning and Research Technology (ILRT),
University of Bristol
@MrJ1971

2. JISC Funded
• A Rapid Innovation project under the
Information Environment strand
• £40,000 grant
• 6 Months @ 1.1 FTE
• Most of the work done during August to
November

3. The Pitch ...
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tonivc/2283676770 http://www.flickr.com/photos/nullalux/2261949240
A time and location sensitive application
for students ....

4. Examples ...
• Where is the nearest wireless
hotspot?
• Where is there a free PC to use?
• When is the next bus to the hall of
residence?
• Which library is open now?

5. Website and native
applications for ...
Android iPhone

6. Why?
• Increasingly popular devices
• iPhone OS works also on iPod Touch -
cheaper, but no GPS
• Both use Webkit for web browser rendering
engines
• Team has experience with programming
languages used in SDKs
• Developers have an interest in both platforms
• I wanted an iPhone

7. Our Solution
Remote
Remote
Remote
Website
Website
Website
HTML/JSON JSON RDF
Proxy Harvest
RESTful Interface Proxy Harvester
Update
Query
Datastore

8. Demo
When is the next bus?

10. Native Android app for bus
times

11. Problems encountered
• No Data
- The University needs a
geo-location database. KML
files can only take you so far.
• Data, but the wrong format
- We needed to scrape HTML
pages in some circumstances,
e.g. PC availability
• Data - inaccurate information Photo by dullhunk - http://flic.kr/p/yBG4q
- RSS feeds of the Service Status don’t always reflect
the corresponding website

12. The Future ...
• Promote the project outputs within the
University to create interest
• Try and create a community with other
institutions ... the software is open
source
• Look for further public funding or
commercial support

13. Alternatives
• University of Oxford is creating a
Python/Django based open source
project to deliver services to mobile
devices. This is based on their Mobile
Oxford work
• Commercial solutions like campusM
from oMbiel

14. More Information
• Demo Site:
<http://mca.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
• Project Blog:
<http://mobilecampus.ilrt.bris.ac.uk>
• Source code:
<http://github.com/MikeJ1971/mobile-
campus-assistant>
For general queries about the project please contact Nikki Rogers
(nikki.rogers@bristol.ac.uk). For technical queries please contact
Mike Jones (mike.a.jones@bristol.ac.uk).