Foundations of Location Based Services

Stefan Steiniger, Moritz Neun and Alistair Edwardes (Department of Geography at the University of Zürich) wrote a lecture notes on the Foundations of Location Based Services. The document aims at identifying the components and participants of LBS applications, describing the interaction of components, and explain what context means, and listing five types of context awareness and list three levels of adaption in LBS applications.

Refering to the work of Tumasch Reichenbacher [1], they categoize the five key mobile actions where geographic information takes a role (locating, searching, navigating, identifying and checking).

Activities during mobility, will often have spatially related actions embedded. These actions result out of user questions or desires. Reichenbacher (2004) identified five elementary mobile actions with respect to user needs on geographic information. The most obvious question is to know where the user himself is with respect to somebody or something else (locating). Users may search for persons, objects or events (searching) and they ask for the way to a location (navigating). Other questions ask for properties of a location (identifying) or they would try to look for events at or nearby a certain location (checking). It should be noted that checking uses not only geo-information but involves also time, since it refers to state of entities or events as well.

1. Reichenbacher, Tumasch (2004): Mobile Cartography – Adaptive Visualisation of Geographic Information on Mobile Devices. Verlag Dr. Hut, München, 2004, ISBN 3-89963-048-3

They also provide a rather complete categorization of LBS applications

Relation to my thesis: I was looking for some time now a categorization of the elementary mobile actions with respect to user needs on geographic information. They mention some user-centered questions I am working on in terms of interactivity and information visualization

User Interface: How can the user or (navigation) system formulate his needs and can make them more concrete after obtaining an overview?

Visualisation: How is the information, returned from LBS, communicated to the user?