Exploiting Context in Location-Based Information Systems

Abstract

The area of mobile location-based information systems enumerates many systems that enable their users to digitally annotate physical locations, providing in this way information to others about these locations, communicating with other people in the proximity and publicly expressing their opinions and thoughts. However, no attempts have been made to facilitate the user in describing important situations through annotations and further on, to analyze the textual data provided in the annotations, in order to extract useful information and exploit this information for the benefit of others. We argue that these annotations could be proved critical, as long as the system exploits their content and the context. In this work we propose a mobile location-based annotation system with enhanced context-aware functionality, which enables users to textually annotate public spaces, mainly streets and squares, in order to inform users and authorities about hazardous circumstances, public issues and other important information.

Convergent location-based messaging

“…However, instead of using the actual approaches of different email addresses for different purposes or tagging the messages according with the contentsolutions that don't treat the amount of content to be handled -we decided to use a location-based paradigm, adding context to the received messages. As stated by Mettouris et al (2010), "the aim of location-based systems is to provide users with the ability to produce and access information that is related to a location." As an illustration within our concept, the same person could be contacted in different context, such as work, by just adding "@work" to his personal address or being notified of important tasks at different places, as supermarkets or pharmacy by adding "@pharmacy".…”

An optical data transmission system for blind persons by means of a mobile phone with the Android operating system

“…This is where location (or location‐based) information systems can be used. Main purpose of those solutions is to provide information that is related to a specific location . The user can be either continuously and actively tracked or his or her presence at the specific location can be detected.…”