Location-Based Services: A Taxonomy on Theory and Practice

Location-Adapted Services

LBS provide users of mobile devices personalized services tailored to their current location. These central information services fall into three broad categories that also emphasize the added value for consumers: positioning and location identification, contextual and environmental location information as well as navigation between different locations.

There exists a vast body of literature on positioning technologies reaching from the early Active Badge indoor locating solutions to the Global Positioning System (GPS) and the more recent Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) and Bluetooth concepts (King et al., 2006).

The diversity of the underlying technological basis as well as the opportunities and limitations among these approaches in design and characteristic means of data networks correspond to the increasing need for adapted LBS infrastructures. These are tailored to the specific requirements of different types of locations, different modes of mobility and distance (Zeimpekis et al., 2003).

The precision of location information and the distance of a mobile device to a Location Service Provider (LSP) are two factors that play a key role in this context. They present the overall framework in which the service layer of key features of applications and infrastructure technology is embedded.