Mobile contextual information gathering concerning a phone number

• Autor(a) principal: João Carlos Teixeira de Sá
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/88590
• topic: Engenharia electrotécnica, electrónica e informática; Electrical engineering, Electronic engineering, Information engineering

Nowadays there are many communication channels that people can use to communicate with each other and mobile phones continue to be one of the most used. Most of the mobile phones used today are smartphones having features such as Internet access or allowing the installation of third party applications. The advances in mobile technolgies alongside the increasing use of social networks and related applications for smartphones contributed to the increasing amount of information shared by people and companies today. On one side, this increasingly available information can be helpful to a person when trying to contextualize an incoming phone call; on the other side, it can also be helpful to companies employees' that talk to customers (for example, sales people or technical assistance people) having access to information about the person they are talking to helping them understand the context of a call and enabling them to offer a better service. Although there is increasingly available information about people and companies, the information can be spread across different places. Besides, there is the risk that the information stored is not accessed before or in the moment a person talks to another making it useless. Therefore, it would be interesting to aggregate the information available from different sources about a phone number and present it when needed (for example, when receiving a phone call). To address the problem described before, a prototype of an Android application for Smartphones was developed that tries to identify the person or company associated with a phone number collecting, in real time, information about that person or company. The collection and processing of the information resorts to parallel searches in different sources simultaneously using the information obtained in a source to search on another (chain collection). The information can come from public and/or private sources of information (only appliable for companies as they can resort to customers' databases) being displayed in a pop-up while in a phone call or when searching for a phone number.