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Open standards in location based services
The Need for Standards in LBS Cliff Kottman’s “Pizza Story” illustrates the various future network-resident services that might come into play when a motorist tells his “personal information appliance” that he needs Pizza for his kids when they are driving for beaches: Voice Recognition software interprets a spoken request as a query for the nearest Pizza places. The broker submits the request along with coordinates and direction from the onboard GPS to a Pizza restaurant Database, which reports the nearest three Pizza restaurants’ addresses to a Mapping Service. The Mapping Service queries a Road Map Database and a set of preferences describing how the Pizza seeker prefers to have the data presented – map, voice directions, etc. It presents route information and preferences to the presentation service, which packages information for delivery to the Pizza seeker. The Story illustrates the complexities involved in this area  Component on Network Data Updation Emerging Standards in Technology Standards have evolved over that last decade in information Technology and those have shaped major technological development. These include besides others
Projected Benefits
Developing of standards for Geographic Data The data formats about the point of interest have to be standardised for inter-module communication in a LBS. This includes standardisation of Meta Data and the geographic data itself. The ISO TC 211 and the OGC framework on Simple Geometry features provide the background to further development in this regard. It follows that all such development would be based on XML specifications and others by the W3C. Developing Standards for data interchange at different levels Standards for data interchange have to be set up at an industry level that encompasses all parties involved. The TCP headers that need to be embedded at various levels of transport as shown in the figure need to be decided. Development of components based on standards Iterations of Deployment, Improvement and Redeployment Tools based on standards decided have to be developed quickly and benefits have to be demonstrated at the earliest. For example a product for Real-time updating of route network data for Route finding servers could be designed based on the architecture shown below. This would use standard data types defined for the geographic data and could be developed independent of the other applications on route finding. As these tools and component are deployed and further opportunities are discovered need for further specifications and standards would come up. This cycle of development and specification would thus help to ensure a better future for the LBS as a whole. Conclusion Open standards do pose an important opportunity for the Location services including that of faster developments, interoperability, wider competition and collective efforts in the industry. It also calls for higher interaction between industry players. This would lead to lesser accountability for the entire Location based systems, as individual components would be obtained. This perhaps is the biggest challenge in the path of Open standards. Acknowledgement The authors wish to thank Tata Infotech Ltd for permission to carry out the work presented in the paper. The views presented are that of the authors alone. References
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