Senior Project - Mirage

The concept of a location-based spatial wiki was developed by Professor Dirk Grunwald, the sponsor of the project. While the wiki concept is fairly new to the Internet, the general goal of a wiki is to bring the collaborative power of open source development to website design. All content on a wiki-based website is maintained by its users, who may or may not be subject to certain levels of access control.

This project's goal was to extend the functionality of a wiki by implementing a novel paradigm of web browsing based on location-dependent, dynamically deployed content -- the content a user sees is dependent on the location of the user interacting with the wiki. For example, a user accessing the wiki from the UMC may see a listing of events going on in the UMC at the current time. A user accessing the wiki from the Engineering Center Office Tower may be provided with floor plans showing the location of various faculty, department offices and conference rooms. A critical aspect of Mirage is that the users can not only view this information, but they can add to it as well.

Not only was the project successful from a software development standpoint, it was also very successful from a research standpoint. As a testament to the quality of the research, the team along with their sponsor submitted a paper, which was accepted to 2005 WEBIST (International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies). The project also won the Department of Computer Science 2005 Lloyd Fosdick Award, intended to recognize exemplary collaborative projects that include Computer Science undergraduates as participants.