How can I develop a vehicle tracking application on a tight budget?

Question

I need to develop and GIS application in .net with following Requirement, Can you please suggest the options how can i start with.

I am new to GIS World, but I have a good knowledge. I neither developed any GIS application before!

1) We need to track vehicles on the map, the data recieved from Multiple Controllers connected Over Ethernet.

2) Display of Movements of Multiple Vehicles to be Provided for simultaneous operation.

3) Displaying Latitude, Longtitude, Altiitude, Roll, yaw, Pitch, Velocity with Every Vechicle.

4) Unique Icons for Multiple vehichles (icon should be configurable)

5) Provision for the modes to facilitate selection of vehicles for simultaneous display on Map.

6) Automatically move the Vehicle icon representing the respective vehicle, to the correct geographic location on map when vehicle change the position.

7) Automatic PAN movement of the area concerned on the digital map during Online Vehicle Tracking.

8) Calculate Actual disptance traveled by vehicle along with Aerial Distance,

9) Calculate relative distance between two vehicles.

10) Digital Map retrieval and display as per the area of operation.

11) Provision for additional icons creation on the map. (These icons should be displayed for futher use)

12) Provision of Information Layer (Peliminary/Detailed information about Terrain etc), 3D ANALYSIS

13) Geo-Referencing Facility. It should be able to digitize it by georeferencing.

14) Import digital masp irrespective of their original/native format.

15) OS Platform independency.

1. It should support Military grid coodrinate Data.

17) Provision for Defininf Waypoints with positioning Information

18) Multiple Access to various Digital map,image map like geotiff,.jpeg,.dted image

19) Integration of scanned maps, satellite images .

20) Zoom in Zoom out, Zoom in Max Scal1 1:1 and zoom out 1:50000

21) User Specified scale and Dynamic display of scale in the Mapview

22) Exchange of GIS Data for generation of Reports.

23) Import/Export Maps using .dgn (Microstation DGN) format.

Answer 1

Not knowing your budget i'll try to give you options.

First thing is you're not going to find an SDK/API that you can do all of the things you mention. It's going to take a combination of technology and customized programming to make it happen.

1) GeoDatabase:

Start out with a GeoDatabase you can store all the collected data in. You have Oracle Spatial, MS SQL spatial, among others but my favorite-which happens to be free and open source, PostGIS.

2) WEB Data Services:

You can serve out the data via geo-web services in standardized REST, GeoJSON and SOAP protocols. These will create the layers of data your application will be consuming. The Microsoft (big daddy) of them all would be ESRI ArcGIS Server. But I prefer GeoServer or Mapserver again, free and open source.

3) Visualization:

Your going to need an API to visualize your data. There's got to be endless possibilities. Google Maps, Bing Maps, ESRI Javascript/flex/flash and other apis, and my favorite OpenLayers. Your guest it, free and opensource. And these are only the web-based mapping API's you have a slew of other OS install-able options.

4) Authoring:

To help in editing, creating, viewing your data you'll need an application for that. The framework you choose might dictate this though. If you go with ESRI products you'll probably find yourself using Arc-XXX (arcmap, arcscene,...) products. But if you go the opensource free way you could use QGIS among others.

5) Customization:

Once you have all these tools you can use their API's to do what you need. You'll probably use at least a dozen other tools such as GDAL, JQuery, Python APIs, C# APIs to do what you want. But it's going to take baby steps.

Truth is: It can take you a while to get a hand of everything. I imagine learning the GIS as you go is going to slow down progress significantly. You're bound to make rookie mistakes. But if you don't have a timeline and this is more of a learning process go for it! If you have a budget thought, you might want to consider hiring someone to help you out. There's a lot to projections, datums, routing networks and just GIS in general. You'll need to get a grasp of the Geographic part in G.I.S. to do a good job.

Hope this helps your journey of building what sounds to be a great app.