Development of a Navigation and Information Service for a University Library

Abstract

This paper reports about a feasibility study conducted at TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, for the development of a navigation and information service. Such a service can be a helpful tool for students, staff and visitors of the University for finding the way around campus with its four inner city locations. Due to the presence of Wi-Fi the IT department decided to build-up this service using this technology for communication and positioning. The requirements were defined so that a service user is able to navigate between buildings and indoors. For the service in the library the ambitious goal was set that the correct bookshelf and in a further development also the books can be found. For book labelling thereby RFID tags shall be employed. To investigate the feasibility and the practicability of the developed service extensive Wi-Fi mapping collecting RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) data was conducted in this work. Measurements in three different modes were performed, i.e., static, stop-and-go and kinematic. The analyses indicate that positioning accuracies on the meter level in the library building and other areas in the campus in combined out-/indoor environments are achievable using location fingerprinting. When comparing the three different modes, the resulting accuracies in kinematic positioning were only slightly lower than for static or stop-and-go measurements. Thus, kinematic system training and positioning can be performed saving a lot of time for data acquisition.