1.4.2. Interactive LBS

Questions and Answers

The purpose of highly interactive LBS are to allow users to ask questions related to themselves and their environment and obtain answers to these from an information resource. Such questions might be "Where am I?", "Where can I find something to eat? "What is this building?", "What hotels are near me?", "How do I get to the train station?" etc. Answering such questions might be done using a map, text and multimedia descriptions e.g. a web page about a hotel, with a list of items that are of interest or through the description of a route (graphically, text or audio based).

Actions and questions

There is of course a limitless range of possible questions that users might ask an LBS. Whilst on first consideration this may seem a daunting prospect to designing a service, most questions can be categorised into a few basic actions that the user is aiming to achieve. We can identify 5 main types of actions that are performed by users when using an LBS (Reichenbacher 2004).

Use the interaction below to organise the different questions by dragging them underneath the action they represent. The question will change colour to green with the right answer.

Action characteristics

Actions can be characterised according to the information that needs to be inputted to them and what will result. Different types of action will have different characteristics depending on the focus of interest and any constraints on the action. For example, in the question "Which hotels are near me?", the action is searching, the focus of interest is hotels and the constraint on the search is the hotels should be "near me".

Action	Input	Constraints	Output
Identify	An individual object to be identified (e.g. a POI on a map)	None	A detailed object description or category
Browse	A detailed object description or category (e.g. a web page about a hotel)	None	A detailed object description or category
Search	A category (e.g. 'Birds')	A spatial and temporal scope	The set of individual objects in a list or object locations on a map
Locate	An individual object or set of objects (e.g. entries in a list of hotels, or the user them self)	A spatial and temporal scope	Locations of objects
Navigate	A pair of locations (e.g. the users current location and the location of a restaurant)	Type of route calculation (e.g. fastest, easiest, most interesting)	Sequence of objects (path segments or landmarks)

Chaining actions

By taking the output of one action and feeding it into another, actions can be chained into a sequence of interactions. For example, the user might locate an object on a map, giving them a location and then navigate to it from their current location.

Consider the following scenario. You have just arrived in a new city and want to find a hotel to stay the night in. You lookup "Hotels in downtown" on your LBS and receive a list of hotels. You go through the list of hotels one by one until you find the Metropole Hotel, which you like. You look at where the hotel is on the map and see that it is well situated for you. You then ask the LBS for the most direct route to get there.

Can you identify the sequence of actions in this example? (Click here for more information)