View source for OR/14/073 Appendix 1: Case Study – Mobile app development techniques and strategies at the British Geological Survey (BGS)

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The European Union INSPIRE Directive, the United Kingdom’s (UK) Location Strategy and the Natural Environment Research Council Information Strategy all require that BGS provides access to its information and data holdings in flexible and interoperable ways that maximises access and encourages innovative uses by stakeholders.

The BGS iGeology app goes some way to address this by providing a mechanism for the general public, academia and businesses to access the digital geology mapping at 1:50&nbsp;000 scale for the whole of the UK on a mobile device (Figure&nbsp;21).

[[Image:OR14073fig21.jpg|thumb|center|350px|  '''Figure 21'''&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Screenshots from the BGS iGeology app.    ]]

The reach of traditional media channels continues to be eroded by the rapid spread of web-based alternatives, especially on mobile devices. It is anticipated that the proportion of internet traffic accessed using mobile devices will surpass that accessed using desktop computers in 2014 (WPP, 2014)<ref name="WPP 2014">WPP (2014) 10 GLOBAL COMMUNICATION TRENDS IN 2014. Available from: http://www.wpp.com/wpp/marketing/publicrelations/10-global-communication-trends-2014</ref>. So it is no surprise that the delivery of BGS data to mobile platforms through bespoke ‘mobile apps’ is a key element of its open data delivery and communications strategy. Current user feedback demonstrates that these apps have stimulated significant public engagement, created economic benefits for commercial users and encouraged a general interest in the geological sciences. For example:

<p align="center">''“Fantastic to have this information at your fingertips. I use it regularly in my job as a wildlife and<br>natural history interpreter&nbsp;—&nbsp;thank you NERC<ref name="NERC">The UK’s Natural Environment Research Council</ref>.”''</p>

<p align="center">''“Extremely useful for my career as an Arboricultural consultant<br>(specifically the ease if obtaining very low cost subsidence reports on site almost instantaneously).”''</p>

<p align="center">''“The updates to this app are just brilliant. Thank you for a superb reference application.”''</p>

http://www.bgs.ac.uk/data/apps/igeology/reviews.html

Since its launch iGeology has been downloaded over 180&nbsp;000 times from 123 countries around the world. It was featured on BBC Radio 4’s Material World and was the No.1 free education application when it was launched. There have been over 100 million map requests through the iGeology app (Figure 22), demonstrating that users are ready to receive geology information in this way. iGeology is now being used to provide additional commercial services, offering in-app purchases for site assessment reports relating to natural subsidence and radon risk. This enables BGS to deploy a freemium business model approach to information delivery services via its mobile apps and provides users with immediate access to value-added information when in the field.

[[Image:OR14073fig22.jpg|thumb|center|500px|  '''Figure 22'''&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Increasing numbers of map requests from BGS mobile apps over time.    ]]

The technology BGS has developed and utilised to provide its smartphone apps is generic and can be applied to other scientific datasets worldwide. For example, the core iGeology code was repurposed to develop the European ‘mySoil’ app. Furthermore, the ‘iGeology 3D’ augmented reality app (Figure 23), which overlays geological information on the landscape around you could also be re-purposed to overlay any spatial data from any discipline on top of an augmented reality landscape.

[[Image:OR14073fig23.jpg|thumb|center|500px|  '''Figure 23'''&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Screenshots from the BGS iGeology 3D app.    ]]

iGeology was developed as a fully ‘native’ app, which gives the user the best user experience and allows the app full access to the hardware capability of the device. Unfortunately, creating native apps for each mobile platform requires developing the app in different languages and development environment e.g.

* Objective C for Apple iOS
* Java for Android
* .NET for Windows Phone
* C++ for Symbian

BGS did not have the resources or skills to develop an application for each platform, so had to develop a strategy to maximise platform support without compromising usability. BGS’s current strategy is to only support native app development on the two leading smartphone platforms, currently iOS and Android. Their experience has shown that in the UK over 70% of their mobile user base is iOS. Therefore such apps will be developed for this platform first. If they don’t prove to have the impact expected after an agreed assessment period then lower cost developments will be employed to support Android and other platforms (e.g. mobile websites).

Another strategy employed to reduce the development costs in supporting multiple platforms has been to utilise a web service architecture. This methodology has been particularly successful in mySoil which brings together soil information from different research centres and presents them seamlessly in an easy-to-use mobile app (Figure&nbsp;24). Users of mySoil can view soil maps of the UK and EU that provide regional information on soil depth, texture, pH, temperature and organic-matter content and vegetation habitats. Initially developed by the British Geological Survey (BGS) and Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), it has recently expanded with partnerships to include data from the Met Office and Joint Research Centre (JRC).

[[Image:OR14073fig24.jpg|thumb|center|500px|  '''Figure 24'''&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Screenshots from the BGS, CEH, Met Office, JRC mySoil app.    ]]

Users can also upload photos and descriptions of their local soils, thus contributing to a valuable data bank of soil properties in different localities (Figure&nbsp;25). The additional soil property information that is gathered is linked to a geographically referenced point location. Information collected by citizens is presented alongside information from research centres, enabling visual comparison of different datasets. The citizen gathered information is collected under a Creative Commons licence, creating a community owned dataset that can be used for many different purposes. Research centres can use the data to validate and improve their existing datasets and information products. Businesses and other organizations can use the data to create new products. The remarkable success of collecting data in this way reflects widespread public interest and promotes communication with the science community.

[[Image:OR14073fig25.jpg|thumb|center|500px|  '''Figure 25'''&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;Citizen science soil records collected via the mySoil mobile app and represented via web services in the UK Soil Observatory portal.    ]]

In order to support as many users and platforms as possible, mySoil was developed as a lightweight client, connected to platform independent web services. Each distributed partner of mySoil (BGS, CEH, Met Office and JRC) developed and hosted web services that were designed to comply with the Open Geospatial Consortium web map service (WMS) and INSPIRE standards. This allowed the bulk of the data preparation, management and rendering to be completed on the server of each host organisation. The results are then served in a simple form that the client ‘app’ can process and display.

By using a web service architectural approach mySoil could be delivered via an iOS app (iPhone/iPad), an Android app and a web interface. All the applications used the same underlying web services, which not only reduces the development cost, but it also means that the data can be updated remotely by the individual host organisations without updating the client software, decentralising the whole update process.

==References==
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[[Category: OR/14/073 Reusable tools for smartphone apps: innovative activities in the European geological sector | 16]]