work in progress; last updated: 9. October 2008

An Introduction to Woophoo

GPS positioning and internet-capable mobile devices become more and more common, and are available at low cost. If a suitable service is provided, new ways open up in route planning and tracking - which is not a necessity, but at many instances may be very useful and rewarding. Woophoo is a collection of free services aiming to
Woophoo provides a java-based software - Woophoo client - to collect GPS data using arbitrary mobile phones. This client software is free and is able run on most mobile phones and mobile devices which have internet connection and a built-in GPS receiver or an external bluetooth GPS device. The client sends geographical data to the Woophoo server, and provides handy functions like displaying maps, showing locations and messages of friends etc.

Using the collected geographical data the server can provide the services above in a number of different ways; the most important one is the web interface under woophoo.com. After logging in you can search and organize your past tracks, search for friends, browse public tracks, attach information or photos to tracks, see up-to-date traffic status of a selected area, etc.

The best way to become familiar with Woophoo services is simply logging in and trying it out. We try our best to add helpful texts and links and build an intuitive interface, however, reading the next few chapters would come in handy.

Concepts and Notions

GPS stands for Global Positioning System, which can be used for free with GPS devices to determine one's precise location using signals of US GPS satellites (see GPS on Wikipedia). GPS receiver devices can display your location, plan routes, and, record movements using navigation software (see GPS navigation device and GPS navigation software on Wikipedia ). The most important devices in our case are GPS receivers in mobile phones, and small external devices connected to phones, laptops, PDAs or smart phones - you only need a common mobile device and a built-in or external Bluetooth GPS receiver to use Woophoo. To search for current Bluetooth GPS devices, simply try a Google search.


The most important concept of Woophoo is 'track'. A track is a trace of our movements, a sequence of geographic locations in time. You can freely measure tracks turning on and off your client software, which is collecting your locations. For example, you can create (measure) tracks for your different routes coming to your workplace and going home. The next track for example was recorded while walking around at Lake Balaton on a nice summer afternoon. As we can see, it consists of a sequence of locations between the start and end points. We also attached pictures to some of these points.


Switch to larger map

As on the figure above, tracks are displayed on a map. Woophoo itself does not provide maps and mapping services, however, lots of public web mapping services are available, like Google Maps, Yahoo Maps, Live Search Maps or OpenStreetMap (OSM). These services provide interfaces to query terrain or satellite images containing roads, street names, rivers, satellite images and a lot more objects of a given area. Our tracks, which are essentially only sequences of locations, are visualized by these freely available and always improving services.

All the tracks are assigned to the person who created the given tracks; these are the Woophoo users. You can create your own user by registering on woophoo.com. Users have to sign in, both when measuring a track and when browsing tracks on woophoo.com.

It is a primary expectation to enable users to form groups, fleets and to track members - where they are now, when they have last been seen. The Woophoo terminology for such groups is Bunche. The figure below depicts an open and public bunch (called openpublic), displaying the last known locations of the users in the bunch. While it is open, everyone can join (try clicking on the join link), and while it is public, we can display the bunch without signing in (and we can also embed the figure anywhere, like in this document).




Accessing tracks, location data, bunch members and all operations working with sensitive personal data are regulated by access privileges. Privileges are basically special relations between tracks, users and bunches defining available access operations. By default everybody has the right to access and to modify her/his own tracks and bunches. She/he can grant other users or fleets these rights, but nobody else, and in this way sensitive personal information, for example the current geographic location cannot be accessed by un-authorized people. These privileges can be defined however in many ways in depending on the given environment. You can grant access to a friend for a track, give the right to someone to join our bunch etc.
A special kind of bunch is the public bunch: this one includes everyone - not only registered users, but also every possible user. You can grant access to tracks to this public bunch by making a track public. In this case everyone can view the track, even without signing in to Woophoo: embedding bunch figures to a webpage, as shown in the example above. Please read our privacy policy for more information.

First Steps

It's fairly straightforward to begin using Woophoo.

Woophoo.com can be used as a guest user: in this case you don't have your own tracks or own bunches, but you can view and browse all the publicly available tracks and location info. All services built on these data are available. Try clicking on the 'Skip login' image on the login screen. Actually, you can measure tracks as guest user: you only have to set up our client to use the username 'guest' with an empty password.

To measure your own tracks, create your own bunches you have to sign up: it's easy, just click the 'Sign up now' link on the login screen. You have to choose a user id, which is unique: different users can't have the same id. Try choosing a safe, long password with some numbers and capitals. You also have to solve a 'Captcha', which is a test to confirm that you are not a computer completing millions of forms per minutes, but real users. We understand that solving some of these could be challeging for a human, too. Apologies for that. If you think the displayed captcha is too difficult to solve just use one of the built in options of the captcha and request another one. There is a significant chance they are more readable than the previous one. Woophoo does not require detailed information about you, only a user id and a password - the email address - which is the only additional field - is optional. After signing up, you can access all services, and ready to collect your tracks.

To set up the client side, you have to first pick up a mobile device able to run Java applications - mostly a mobile phone, which we already own. If this device doesn't contain an internal GPS receiver, you have to get one, possibly a Bluetooth GPS receiver (try Google to search one). In this case you have to be sure that your mobile device and the GPS receiver are able to communicate with each other via Bluetooth. The Woophoo mobile client uses internet, so you have to be sure that your service provider provides you internet access. The client application doesn't require much, usually the smallest package with the lowest data transfer limits are enough. If you got the required devices, you can download the Woophoo client. This can be done by typing woophoo.com/d in the internal browser of our device, or by downloading it to a computer and trasferring it to the device via Bluetooth or cable. The direct download is however simpler. The download page is pretty simple: you only have to select the type of your mobile device. If you would like to install the client directly, click the 'install' link, otherwise, if you would like to download only, and install later, the 'down' link. If you do not find the type of your device, try the 'Generic' client, and please write us a request in the forum. Setting up the Woophoo client is simply entering our user id and password. This can be done by going to the 'Settings' menu. If you don't want to display our location on a map on-line, you can also turn the client to 'silent mode' here; in this case the client only collects and sends location data, but doesn't display it on a map.

If you need more information on the Woophoo client, please read the client user guide. If you need more info on the Woophoo web services, please refer to the web services user guide.

If you completed these steps above, you are ready to use the full functionality of Woophoo. Have fun!

Development and Project Status

Woophoo is a semi-professional project. The project is in open beta status. Please consider trying it out then make your comments, bug reports or feature requests. We are fairly low on resources; if you want to join our team or to participate in API design, feel free to contact us.

See also