Collecting and Utilizing Point-Of-Interest (POI) Data Cost-Effectively with Mobile Technologies

Abstract

Pajat Management offers the PoiMapper mobile GIS cloud service. The company was created in September 2009 and has been developing the solution in close collaboration with Plan International. Our application is a combination of data collection features and mapping features in one package enhanced with features that help specifically with program monitoring and related field work.  PoiMapper supports an organization’s work processes because it supports integration with other information systems and flow of data between systems. They way the data flow works is that one can starts by populating the PoiMapper server with existing data from other sources. The way the PoiMapper database is structured is that it consists of users, user groups, definitions of questionnaire forms, POI forms, and also route and area forms. An important feature of PoiMapper is that one can define area hierarchies that are then used to organize and access the filled forms. Completed data is then uploaded to the server. In our portal one can use filtering and search to identify data sets of interest , visualize data on maps , do history traces of edit histories for instance of any point of interest and export data for further visualization and analysis, in Excel, SPSS, ArcGIS or Highcharts. To ensure privacy and security of data and enable having data only on the customer premises, each organization gets their own database. The organizational benefits are three fold: increase efficiency in actual field work, less error in data and faster availability of data to the stakeholders and ultimately improved decision making and planning ability.