Location and Personalisation: Delivering Online and Mobility Services
This book takes a look at two application technologies location and personalization and presents an understanding of the technical and business impact of these technologies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS Location and Personalisation: Delivering Online and Mobility Services
Chapter 2: An Overview of Location-Based Services
T D'Roza and G Bilchev
2.1 Introduction
A location-based service (LBS) can be described as an application that is dependent on a certain location. Two broad categories of LBS can be defined as triggered and user-requested.
In a user-requested scenario, the user is retrieving the position once and uses it on subsequent requests for location-dependent information. This type of service usually involves either personal location (i.e. finding where you are) or services location (i.e. where is the nearest ...). Examples of this type of LBS are navigation (usually involving a map) and direction (routing information).
A triggered LBS by contrast relies on a condition set up in advance that, once fulfilled, retrieves the position of a given device. An example is when the user passes across the boundaries of the cells in a mobile network. Another example is in emergency services, where the call to the emergency centre triggers an automatic location request from the mobile network.
2.2 Positioning Technology
2.2.1 Global Positioning System (GPS)
Design of the global positioning system was begun in 1978 by the United States Department of Defense. Its original intended use was for military positioning, navigation and weapons aiming, but in 1984 following the crash of a civilian Korean Airlines flight the previous year due to poor navigational equipment, President Reagan announced that some of the capabilities of GPS would be made available for civilian use. In April 1995 the complete system containing 24 operational satellites in an 11 000 nautical mile orbit at a...
Copyright British Telecommunications plc 2004 under license agreement with Books24x7
