• 1. Foundations of LBS
  • 1.1. What are LBS?
  • 1.2. How is it useful?
  • 1.3. What’s special about it?
  • 1.4. How does it work?
  • 1.5. Summary
  • 1.6. Recommended Reading
  • 1.7. Glossary
  • 1.8. Bibliography
  • 1.9. Metadata

1.5. Summary

Location Based Services will become more and more part of our everyday life. First services are already provided for mobile phone users like friend finders, weather information or city event boards. Other location services like road tolling for trucks or fleet management are also already operational LBS business applications. In this lesson we defined first what Location Services are and presented afterwards some fundamental characteristics of such services:

We saw that the LBS architecture consists of five basic components: Mobile Devices, Positioning, Communication Network, Service Providers and Content Providers. These components have been shortly discussed in the last subsection of the lesson. Further we gave an example how these components act together in the processing chain of a service request sent by a user. In the second section we presented user actions and questions from which the types of services (operations), needed by users, emerge. Five types of actions have been identified: locating, searching, navigating, identifying and checking. Context awareness has been emphasised as a major feature of LBS technology. Therefore context has been defined and 9 types have been listed and visualized (e.g. location, time, social situation, system, etc.). Using context in an LBS application has been introduced as adaption. Four levels of adaption have been identified (information, technology, user interface and presentation) and effects could be discovered in an interactive tool. Finally a long list with LBS application examples has been given and four properties to characterise an application are presented: the application area (e.g. navigation, emergency, information, etc.), positional accuracy needs, application environment (indoor/outdoor), and delivery type (push and pull services).

Since this lesson does present only the basics on LBS the further lesson will give some closer insight into the characteristic, partially with a specific focus on map presentations of results received from a Location Service. Some of the LBS Components (Networks, Devices and Positioning) introduced here will be discussed in the Lesson Techniques for LBS Cartography in more detail. User actions and goals as well as context will be issues of the Lesson Designing Maps for LBS. But context will also play a role in a further lesson on Solutions for small screen map design.

Update: 26.1.2012 (eLML) - Contact - Print (PDF) - © CartouCHe 2004-2007 (Creative Commons) - layout based on YAML