Location-based Information Systems Research Articles

The use of multimodal interaction for supporting the production of location-based information

Despite the increasingly volume of location-based information systems, it is a common practice to develop these technological resources aiming for the usage by professional content providers. Non-experts users appear as an important alternative of impartial contributions in this scenario. In this manner, multimodal interaction ‑ particularly, gestures recognition and voice commands ‑ can open further opportunities for support the usage by common users. This paper therefore aims to analyze the contributions on the use of multimodal interaction for supporting the production of location-based information. Its research methodology is based on a conceptual framework as well as usability analysis with real users. The results revealed that non-experts users often take a while before becoming confident with new kinds of interaction. It also shown that voice commands were rather more useful than gestures according to the users. Furthermore, even with long years of research in the field, technological resources still need improvements for the speech and gesture recognitions, mainly due to the idiosyncrasies presented on this interaction. Although additional research is still necessary in this area, it can be concluded that multimodal interactions have a great potential for supporting the production of location-based information.

Near-Rand: Noise-based Location Obfuscation Based on Random Neighboring Points

In recent years Location-Based Information Systems have increased its popularity in the market of mobile applications, however, due to the ability of smartphones and similar devices to estimate location in real time using GPS or through network providers; it is critical to implement techniques to protect such sensitive information while still make it available to the service provider. This paper presents Near-Rand, a new random noise-based location obfuscation technique. This algorithm generates random points around the real location of the user within a neighbor-size squared area and calculates the n nearest points average to the user's location giving as result an obfuscated point. Compared to Pinwheel, another noise-based obfuscation mechanism, it shows a similar performance against Exponentially Moving Average-based filtering attacks, while being able to use non-uniformly distributions for random points.

TransportML platform for collaborative location-based services

Currently, each geographical area benefits from a set of wide range of local services, usually provided by several local entities, such as snow clearance, road works, public transportation, waste collection, fire fighting, emergency rescue authorities, etc. Despite each service fulfilling its own assigned task, they often suffer from a lack of communication and cooperation among them. Indeed, each service collects road-related information that may be useful to other services. Sharing information collected by each service would allow the acquisition of more knowledge about the driving context that may help drivers making appropriate decisions and, therefore, increase and improve road safety. Recently, wireless communication technologies associated with global navigation satellite systems and location-based information systems are among the powerful technologies used to develop interoperable intelligent transportation systems applications. Furthermore, the evolution of service-oriented infrastructures enables information sharing between applications over the network. In this paper, a distributed platform, called TransportML, for services interaction and cooperation is presented. It is an extended XML platform based on service-oriented architecture principles to recognize, monitor, and collect service information and description over a network. A prototype is developed and tested in urban and highway areas and results are reported to show the benefit of using this platform for sharing road information as well as services’ interactions.

Privacy-respecting location-based service infrastructures

This article presents an approach for the design of location-based information systems that support privacy functionality. Privacy-enhancing technology (PET) has been available for a considerable a...

Privacy-Respecting Location-Based Service Infrastructures: A Socio-Technical Approach to Requirements Engineering

This article presents an approach for the design of location-based information systems that support privacy functionality. Privacy-enhancing technology (PET) has been available for a considerable amount of time. New online applications and infrastructures for mobile and ubiquitous use have been installed. This has been done without usage of available PET, although they are favored by data protection experts. Designers of locationbased services (LBS) create infrastructures for business or application specific purposes. They have profitoriented views on the rationale for PET deployment. Finally, users have requirements that might be neither on the PET community’s nor on the business people's agenda. Many disciplines provide knowledge about the construction of community-spanning information systems. The challenge for designers of infrastructures and applications is to find a consensus that models all stakeholders’ interests – and takes advantage all involved community’s knowledge. This paper groups LBS stakeholders into a framework based onto a sociological knowledge construct called “boundary object”. For this purpose, a taxonomical analysis of publications in the stakeholder communities is performed. Then the paper proposes a socio-technical approach. Its goal is to find a suitable privacy design for a LBS infrastructure based on the boundary object. Topics for further interdisciplinary research efforts are identified and proposed for discussion.