The One Percent

Introduction
Safety and reliability rating of an area will be the feature to prevent illegal operators, illegal taxis or users being overcharged. Users can verify legal operators and services from the application database, such as the nearest taxis, tour guides, hotels, shops, restaurants, police stations. This article will investigate the feature and discuss its benefits and limitations.

Related Work and limitations

Safety Rating
Global travel warnings and recommendations are publicly available online, such as foreign travel advice from the UK Government (UK Government Digital Service, 2015), and country travel advice and advisories from the government of Canada (Government of Canada, 2015). Figure 1 is the visualisation graph of dangerous destinations and safer spots, which classify destinations with 5 safety levels.

Figure 1 Visualisation graph of dangerous destinations and safer spots, which the data is provided by the government of Canada (CBC News, 2014)

In addition the information provides data in open data format, which the application may subscribe to the feed, and therefore receive updates automatically. Existing apps may provide a limited source of information and functions, like SmartTraveler (US Dept of State, 2014) which only displays US government data, and contains road traffic reporting data in York (The Regional Municipality of York, 2014).

On the other hand, crime Information in the UK is available in Open Data format and free to download from direct.gov.uk.  In the Police API (Home Office, 2015) as shown in Figure 2, provides a rich data source of information, such as street-level crime, outcome data, and nearest police stations.

Figure 2 Police API Documentation, providing instant crime data and details of police stations (Home Office, 2015)

However, current apps may cover a limited amount of information. For example, in the Road Buddy app (Warman, 2013), it only provides walking route to users based on the publicly available police data.

Rating of areas
Since current travel recommendation and review websites have already provided rich travel information, it seems that there is a lack of applications for verifying legal operators, hotels, guesthouse, restaurants, etc. Among popular tourist sites, there are several restrictions on the API usage. For example, in TripAdvisor, the popular travel review website, it only allows up to “10,000 calls per-day” (TripAdvisor LLC, 2014).

The Feature Proposal
In the application, both safety and reliability ratings will be contributed by reliable open data sources and users’ ratings. For safety rating of an area, the app will rely on the open crime data sources, including UK Crime information. It will also adjust its ratings according to user inputs who will be able to rate the safety of a route (after using the route generator), and rate the reliability of other user reviews. Rating will take the format of a short question, such as ‘How safe did you feel using this suggested route? Answer out of 10’. Users’ geographic location will be tracked anonymously, in order to verify the rating.

For reliability rating, like verifying official buildings, such as police stations, embassies and hospitals, the application will preload their information to the users’ devices.  For other places, like attractions and accommodation, the application will access other sites APIs like TripAdvisor for obtaining reviews and recommendations. It will also import open data like license hotels list and food business list for verifying legal operators.
Conclusion
Based on the above research, and lack of similar applications at the moment, the group believes that showing safety and reliability rating of area to users is essential for the application. In addition to this it provides some in depth context for the other features of the app which will aid their usability.

This post represents that the group has chosen appropriate economic and social Contextual Factors that directly link to the marking criteria, and are vital to understanding what requirements a specific app feature has. This is based on market analysis, evaluation, and expert opinions. There is evidence that questions that the app feature has been chosen intelligently (by reference to literature and analysis) to produce a conclusion of professional quality, leading to a successful product. 

This post additionally represents Engineering and Design decisions. These are based on the Contextual Factors and literature review which the group have tailored the product to incorporate. This means that the app feature has considerable research, fluent design and well planned out engineering steps. All of which are apparent in this post, and are also illustrated with media. This app feature dictates future engineering steps, illustrates how and why the product has been influenced in its design, and shows how engineering this app feature will solve problems. 

References
CBC News, 2014. World travel map: dangerous destinations and safer spots. [Online]
Available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/travel-warnings/
[Accessed 10 March 2015].

Government of Canada, 2015. Country travel advice and advisories. [Online]
Available at: http://travel.gc.ca/travelling/advisories
[Accessed 10 March 2015].

Home Office, 2015. Police API Documentation. [Online]
Available at: http://data.police.uk/docs/
[Accessed 7 March 2015].

The Regional Municipality of York, 2014. York Travel Alert – Android Apps on Google Play. [Online]
Available at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.greenowl.yorkregion.android
[Accessed 10 March 2015].

TripAdvisor LLC, 2014. Request API Access – TripAdvisor Developer Portal. [Online]
Available at: https://developer-tripadvisor.com/content-api/request-api-access/
[Accessed 3 March 2015].

UK Government Digital Service, 2015. Foreign travel advice. [Online]
Available at: https://www.gov.uk/foreign-travel-advice
[Accessed 10 March 2015].

US Dept of State, 2014. SmartTraveler – Android Apps on Google Play. [Online]
Available at: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=gov.state.apps.smarttraveler&hl=en
[Accessed 10 March 2015].

Warman, M., 2013. Road Buddy mobile app plots safe routes to walk home. [Online]
Available at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/10047029/Road-Buddy-mobile-app-plots-safe-routes-to-walk-home.html