A critical evaluation of location based services and their potential

Abstract

This Editorial lead article for the Journal of Location Based Services surveys this complex and multi-disciplinary field and identifies the key research issues. Although this field has produced early commercial disappointments, the inevitability that pervasive location-aware services on mobile devices will emerge means that much research is needed to inform these developments. The article reviews firstly: the science and technology of positioning, geographic information science, mobile cartography, spatial cognition and interfaces, information science, ubiquitous computing; and secondly the business, content and legal, social and ethics aspects, before synthesising the key issues for this new field.

GeoHealth: a location-based service for home healthcare workers

“…from 'pending' to 'done'), and that such automatic change should require a certain 'dwell-time' at the physical location of the house. This concern confirms the issue of partitioning streams of location data highlighted by Raper et al (2007), and addressed by, for example, Krimm and Horvitz (2006) and Liu et al (2006).…”

“…One of the most promising aspects of user context for a mobile or portable computer system to respond to is location (Kaasinen 2003, Jones et al 2004, Raper et al 2007. As a subset of context-aware systems, LBSs represent an emerging class of computer systems providing mobile device users with information and functionality that is particularly relevant at a specific geographical location or within a specific distance.…”

“…Within this broad scope, many systems have been developed and described in the research literature over the past decade, envisaging 'blue sky' innovations, exploring user experiences and tackling technical challenges of implementation (Raper et al 2007). The research field of LBSs has developed significantly in its relatively short lifetime and core technologies are now maturing for deployment outside the scope of research prototypes.…”

“…Inspired by these new technological possibilities, our latest location-based prototype application 'GeoHealth' represents an early instance of this potential next wave of Web 2.0 based LBSs described by Raper et al (2007). GeoHealth is a web-based LBS running within the web browser on a laptop or tablet PC.…”

Geographic dimensions of relevance

“…As mobile scenarios become more and more common, it is important to analyse how different relevance concepts deal with a user's mobility (Mountain, 2005;Mountain and MacFarlane, 2007;Raper, 2007;Raper et al, 2007), and represent the world surrounding a user (Reichenbacher, 2004;Reichenbacher and De Sabbata, 2011;De Sabbata and Reichenbacher, 2012). Relevance has always been recognized as a crucial notion for IR, and there is a vast body of literature devoted to it.…”