UPC buildings host a large number of staff: administrative personnel and services (APS), teaching and research staff (TRS), interns, visiting professors, phd students and post-doc students among others. It is often necessary to find people in a multitude of possible scenarios. The most common situation is when a new visitor to the building needs to find the office where somebody is located.
The technology used in the UPC is now obsolete and gives a very inferior service to the capabilities of current computer technology: currently used physical location panels are generally decorations. Needless to say, the hardware has numerous limitations that range from the static nature of the information, to the high cost of maintenance.
The possibility of using computer technology expands exponentially the possible uses of a directory. First it occupies little space. The occupied space is limited to the need for a computer terminal. Typically a location panel can take between 4 m2 and 1m2 on walls in the lobby. It is not always possible to find its optimal position in the spatial distribution of the lobby. In addition, the computerized location panel can be interactive, so that it only presents information relevant to the user. Another advantage of computerized panel is its ease of maintenance and the marginal cost of information updating.
Therefore, the objective of PFC is to create a tool with a graphical user interface that allows interactive access to the directory staff of the buildings of the UPC, also to do a study on existing technologies and how to use them for our purpose
