Presenting special places through spatial data on maps and three dimensional space using augmented reality application sample Tour Istanbul

With the decreasing costs and spreading the ways of transportation, traveling between cities,countries or continents is become easy and cheap. Nowadays, it is possible to travel not only domestic but also abroad at weekends or vacations with a convenient budget. When planing travels, technology is used widely. Book flights, otels and trip plans is done via internet or specialized applications on travel. On the other hand, during sightseeing tours, tourist maps are used. In addition, while walking around streets of a city, It is rough to getting information about a pleasing building, historical place or just a place, if it not famous. Furthermore, the data roaming costs are so high for using cellular data to debrief about the place, if mobile data usage is out of the country. It could be thought likewise the use case is same for tourists who come Istanbul from abroad or another cities of Turkey. The project provides better visuals to the users, using the augmented that has become popular recently. Augmented reality can be explained as computer graphics enrichment of the properties of object in the physical world directly or indirectly simultaneously with the help of a camera . The principle of augmented reality is simply to add new features graphically to the screen of an object that the camera recognizes. However, as the field of work evolves, it has begun to be used independently of the increased reality objects. As an example, a graph can be displayed on the screen when a specific location is reached. As we examine the mobile application market, the examples often use the map infrastructure of major search engines, although there are examples of augmented reality.In addition, there is a problem that applications are presented as packages, there is a charge after a certain number of spatial inquiries. One of the goals of the project is to create a data model of location and detail information which works on the historical peninsula and to keep data in the database. With the creation of this database, which can be attached to various parts of Istanbul may be established later a working structure in the same way to other towns and cities located in Turkey and in other countries. For the first phase of the project, due to the size of İstanbul, data has been collected just for the historical peninsula of İstanbul and around that region. Keeping spatial data is one the tough issue on such projects. Therefore, data has been kept in spatial database. While designing the spatial database, it is paid attention to the subject of data singularity and data consistency. Data model is a basic building block that needs to be studied on the first stage as an application that provides mobile application or data service. Therefore, before starting to develop the system, the type of the data to be used, how to sort it, how to relate to the object at the application layer should be considered in detail and the design of the system should be based on this data model. The resulting data diversity and data quality affect data modeling. In this sense, sample data should be collected before a system is developed. During data modeling, the entity/relationship model structure is used. The entity/relationship model is a diagram that describes the properties of assets and how they relate to other assets. After the data model is completed, the process of implementing model in the database system is started. Objects are kept as tables in the database system, while properties of objects are kept as columns in the tables. Querying the data from database system and performing various analyzes by processing are done by using the structured query language of the database system. Structured Query Language allows to add records to the database system, delete and update operations, as well as to create entity tables and manage properties of these tables. Database performance has a very important role today. Fast and resilient database; the performance of the application that uses the data and the greater number of end users. Due to this reason, the investments made in the databases are a huge commodity. In addition to this, instead of being held on servers by the classical method, the concept of keeping this service in cloud systems is becoming widespread today Touristanbul application provides a rich content of special places, which are brief information about places, photographs, locations of places, in the area of historical peninsula of Istanbul for the tourists. For offering easy use, it could be logged in to the application via social media accounts for instance; Google or Facebook. After user login the application, user encounter with a two dimensional map scene page. In the page, the locations of places are marked. In addition, when it is pressed on a location marker the summary information of places is demonstrated. In addition, it could be switched to three dimensional screen page. With 3D screen, the camera of mobile device is become open and the location markers are showed in the screen via using augmented reality. The application is designed for smart devices for istance; smart phones and tablets that use Android operating system When pressing a marker in 2D and 3D screens show information about the place is shown which is queried from database. For querying information between database and Android application is done within a middleware application. The tasks of middleware application are handling REST calls from Android application, parsing message and querying database for returning a proper dataset. The middleware application is developed by using Model-View-Controller design pattern. In addition, Spring framework is used for practicing a multilayer server-side application. Middleware application is consist of two main module. The controller module that communicates Android application via RESTful services, the model module that controls business flow and data gathering. Also, middleware application has a logging module, database access module that uses Hibernate and security module which is used to make authentication and secure application against attacks. Middleware application provides information which it is consist of construction date, name of place, brief information and photograph. As a result, the main goal of the project is helping tourists with an easy to use application and of course, making the beautiful places of İstanbul visible within social responsibility. The management of spatial data will enable; adding new regions in Istanbul, new cities outside of Istanbul and different cities outside of Turkey. Therefore the project could be used globally. Thanks to getting out of dependency on map providers for instance; Google Maps and Yandex Maps, the need to pay after a certain number of positional queries and the to being stuck to a specific platform have been removed. In the later phases of the project, a criminal map will be formed from the General Directorate of Security or the feedback received from working with commonly used hotel and tourism applications in cooperation with the proprietors, and a module will be designed that brings out safe areas for tourists and determines a route accordingly.When the project theme was identified and studied on the application; documentation sufficiency and ease of existing open source AR modules were not at desired level. In addition the specified AR modules did not work as location based. In the re-examinations at the end of the period, it was seen that the documentation of the open-source AR modules was improved and the usage was facilitated. In the following phases, it is considered to replace the AR module of the mobile application.