CERN Building and Map Interface via WWW and on the Palm
Mark Dönszelmann, Péter Jurcsó · 2001
The buildings at CERN are chrono-chaotically numbered. They are therefore sometimes hard to find without a map and index. A WWW browser can be used to retrieve the location of a building by name or number. A set of electronic maps containing the Meyrin, Prevessin, LEP and SPS sites are available in PostScript format. These maps are used to build a database of the locations of the buildings which together with the maps are accessed by some CGI scripts to provide the browser with a set of GIF bitmap images. These images show the full CERN site, the site of the building and an enlargement of the exact location of the building. A click on the image can show any location at CERN or change the enlargement factor. A Palm application can be used to access the same maps. In this application the maps are stored on the Palm and are drawn on request in real time. The user is thus able to lookup buildings and to interactively scale and translate the resulting picture. The limited memory and CPU resources which are available in the Palm are used to store the maps and building coordinates and to calculate the picture. The application is written in Java to provide portability in future to other hand held devices. It runs on the recently released kvm, an implementation of the Java Micro Edition on top of PalmOS.