Abstract
Location Based Services can be considered as one of the most rapidly expanding fields of the mobile communications sector, with an impressively large application range. The proliferation of mobile/wireless Internet and mobile computing, and the constantly increasing use of handheld, mobile devices and position tracking technologies prepared the grounds for the introduction of this new type of services. The combination of position fixing mechanisms with location‐dependent, geographical information, can offer truly customized personal communication services through the mobile phone or other type of devices. Prompted by the avalanche of technology advances in the aforementioned areas in this paper we present an integrated platform for delivering Location Based Services (LBS). The platform covers the full life cycle of a LBS starting from the specification of the service, covering issues like the deployment and maintenance of services, the service invocation and the final delivery of the produced results to the invoking user. A prototype implementation of the discussed platform was developed and used to perform a series of trial services, with the purpose of demonstrating the pursued functionality.
Highlights
The mobile communications market experiences an unprecedented boom in the recent years
The discussed platform builds upon technical advances in the area of Info-mobility, distributed/mobile computing, and Geographical Information Systems (GIS) and aims to provide all the functionality needed for delivering location-based services in a single platform
This results from the fact, that most of the processing that is required for providing the results of the service is performed by the GIS server in certain cases the Location-Based Services (LBS) architecture has to wait for the answer of the GIS server, resulting to significant delays in the service execution
Summary
The mobile communications market experiences an unprecedented boom in the recent years. Location-Based Services (LBS) is just one such category of services, upon which both manufacturers and mobile operators have invested a lot. The main focus of the platform lies on the LBS domain. It covers the full life cycle of LBS. It provides means that facilitate the creation and provision of such services with minimum effort from all involved parties (e.g., service provider, mobile operator). The technical discussion covers in detail the core system and more roughly the Service Creation Environment, which accompanies the platform and. I. Priggouris et al / A generic framework for Location-Based Services (LBS) provisioning. The article continues with a brief comparison of the pursued system with other platforms available today in the LBS provisioning domain. The article ends with the description of the trials and their results, followed by some conclusions on the discussed work. and some additional thoughts on how to improve the platform in terms of functionality and performance
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