Finding your way around Ireland either for business or pleasure should soon become a lot easier with the help of your mobile phone or personal computer.
Following the mapping of the country with Geographical Information Systems, entailing computer mapping of every address, street, and house in the State, a number of companies have taken advantage of the new resource to make "the stranger in a new town's" life a lot easier.
Even for those who are more familiar with their surroundings, the new Web- and WAP-based services will give users updated information and maps to guide consumers to their shopping, entertainment or business mecca.
A new company Digital Business Consulting - IrelandLife .com is setting up a number of websites, which will be accessible on the Internet and on WAP phones, giving information on everything from businesses and shopping to arts and entertainment.
The first site to be introduced will be Galwaylife.com. Included in the service is a geolocator, which will allow users to find on a computer-generated map the nearest bank, doctor, pub or Internet consultant relative to the user's location.
The introduction of Galwaylife will be followed by similar sites for Cork and Dublin, and a general site for the Republic called Irelandlife.com.
Mr Philip Evans, of Irelandlife, said companies would also, for a fee, be able to get a website page advertising their services to pop up on the person's WAP phone if they were looking on a particular street.
The user will also be able to insert new items on the map or modify existing items, for example earmarking a particular restaurant in an area of a city that they enjoyed, so that, if they come back again, it will be highlighted.
The company also hopes to have a shopping service built into the geolocator, so that people will be able to purchase products in a business they have located on the map from their phone.
Another Irish company, Iris, provides a wide range of GIS location products, including Streetnet, Pinpoint System and Roadnet, on the Internet, which allows people to plan travel routes and estimate travel times as well as finding shops or businesses.
The Iris Group provide a GIS map at 20cm resolution of the country, with a particularly detailed focus on businesses in urban areas, which is in direct competition with An Post and the Ordnance Survey's Geodirectory.
The company also provides consultancy to banks, supermarkets and utilities to enable them to use GIS mapping to assess, for example, in the case of a supermarket, who is buying what, where.
Similarly, in the case of a bank, it can help it determine whether it should open a new branch or close an old one, based on the spatial mapping of demographics, activity and so on.
The system allows them to chose the optimum location for a new branch by mapping the distribution of people and their main traffic routes and nodes of activity.
Mr Harvey Appelbe, chief technical officer with Iris, said the company was aiming to provide users with up-to-the-minute news in areas through which they were travelling, included traffic snarl-ups to be avoided, rather than simply a route-planning service on mobile phone.
He said GIS on mobile phones combined with information on people's buying, eating or travel habits would allow location-specific advertising.
SMS [short message service] messaging will allow advertisers to push products available at the person's location in line with their personal preferences.
The difference between the Ordnance Survey's mapping of the State and Iris's was that Iris concentrated on covering urban areas in more detail, while paying less attention to rural areas, while the Ordnance Survey covered the whole State but, in parts, in less detail than Iris.
GIS application service provider Bizmaps provides its clients, which include the Independent Directory, with software using the Geodirectory which integrates a GIS locator into a website. It allows people who have checked a business in the Independent Directory to go and see the location on a map and plan a route to the business.
Bizmaps plans a mobile version of the product, which will be text-based initially until higher bandwidths become available. The company is a spin-off of GIS consultancy Gamma, one of the first companies to offer software - called Address-Link - using GIS mapping to locate any address in the country.
The software allows companies to correct and keep their database of addresses up to date.
In the telecommunications sector, if a company receives a complaint from a customer anywhere in the State that the transmission to their mobile is garbled or weak, the company can pinpoint their location on a computer-generated map by inputting the person's name and address.
They can then overlay the locations of their transmission points in the areas over the original map to identify the problem.
With GIS, using phone directories, half-inch maps and guide books to find a place may soon become an obsolete activity for the majority of Irish people.
