Design and Operational Principles of Mobile GIS: A Practitioner’s Perspective

Mobile GIS is the integration of Mobile and GIS technology to manage geospatial operation and data from mobile or hand-held computing platforms. This is primarily helpful in field data collection and location-based services. The rapid growth in modern mobile systems further helped the transition of geospatial technology from a desktop environment to field settings. The GIS domain has gradually evolved from a Desktop-based stand-alone environment to a web-based Distributed environment, thereby paving the road for web GIS and mobile GIS. The Desktop GIS allows the user to carry out different rich and computationally heavy geospatial tasks within the office environment. It depends on a desktop-based computing infrastructure. Enterprise GIS or Web GIS is the web-based technique to access geospatial operations through internet browsers. This makes it possible to store, integrate, and analyze enterprise data along with geospatial information.Mobile GIS facilitates geospatial operations in the real field environment beyond desktop environment. It makes field data collection easy and enables real-time updates of ground data in the centralized GIS server. Thus, the GIS database has always up-to-date information that can be used across various applications. The current paper looks into various aspects of the design and development principles of a mobile GIS. The concept and challenges of a mobile GIS are revisited and explored. This is an industrial concept paper that discusses the details of the architectural design of a mobile GIS.