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February 2004 |
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Location based services are here: Are you ready for it?
Application Areas
Location based services employ accurate, real-time positioning of a mobile device to connect end users to nearby points of interest, advise them of current conditions such as traffic and weather or provide routing and tracking information via wireless devices.
LBS applications cover nearly every aspect related to human mobility: Navigation, Health/Safety/Security/Emergency, Convenience, Entertainment, Travel Aids, Productivity Aids, Mobile Work Force Management etc and many aspects related to human/machine interaction like Telematics and even machine-to-machine (e.g. automatic emergency calling for car breakdowns, medical implant malfunctions) etc. LBS applications cover nearly every attractive wireless demographic market, including: parents, teenagers, singles, college students, online communities, business executives, and entrepreneurs.
This also includes businesses that significantly depend on mobile voice and/or data communications to operate their business, such as companies with significant field employee organizations, and businesses dependent on knowing the location of their assets at any moment, such as trucking, logistics providers and railways.
Other important areas where LBS could play an important role are: Emergency Notification, Roadside Assistance, Automatic Collision Notification, Location-Based Emergency Messaging, Insurance/Stolen Vehicle Tracking, Navigation Assistance, Location-Based Traffic Information, Points of Interest, Family Vehicle Locate, Monitoring Location of Children and other Family Members, Monitoring Location of Elderly/Handicapped, Pet/Animal Monitoring, Monitoring the Location of Valuable Assets.
Other applications that can be provided include Where am I, What's near me, and How do I get there. Although Location Determining Technology, such as cell identification and Global Positioning System are still in their infancy, useful applications can still be supplied.
Challenges Ahead
LBS implementation is a complex task and depends on integration of various technologies together. Several issues have to be addressed before successful implementation of any kind of LBS. Some of the major challenges are described hereunder:
Mapping/Applications
The issue of mobile mapping is important in the context of LBS, as the ability to display mapping information on mobile devices such as cell phones and PDAs is limited. The spatial information may simply be text like street address, details of a point of interest, turn-by-turn driving directions or map images like area of interest, shortest route from current location to a specific destination etc. In general, attractive maps are the best means of depicting spatial information, and are hence an essential element of LBS. Moreover, with the development of 3G telecommunications and the wireless Internet, users will be able to gain access to a wide variety of map information.
However, developing mapping applications for the mobile/wireless Internet is challenging for several reasons. The major concern is the restricted display capabilities of mobile devices. Apart from the limited map features that can be displayed, the speed of data transmission to mobile devices is also slow in comparison to a wired network. Moreover, each device speaks a different wireless protocol and supports a variety of different Wireless Markup Languages. For example, WAP-enabled cell phones support the WML. On the other hand, Palm Operating System devices support TTML (Tagged Text Markup Language), and voice-activated Internet applications support the VoiceXML and VoxML mark-up languages.
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