Classifications of Location-Based Services

LBS can be classified according to different measures where each one holds many examples that have different technical specifications. These measures are: target market (consumer services), purpose of application, and technical features and ca-pabilities [34].

1. Target Market

LBS applications focus on three types of target markets [35, 36] which are

“publically accessible for the mass market,” “publically accessible for niche markets”, and for “internal enterprise applications”.

(a) Publically accessible (Mass market): In these applications the con-sumers are the general public, and served with applications that do not require previous registration, for example applications that look for clos-est gas stations or rclos-estaurants. These kinds of LBSs must process:

• Scalability: Ability to handle a huge number of requests.

• Performance: Reasonable performance for the locations to be cov-ered to avoid any network latency.

• Availability: LBSs must maintain highl availability for the MUs since there is no specific way to know if the is system down, public MUs will only see no service available which will disappoint MU user experience.

(b) Publically accessible (Niche market): In these applications the MUs on target are still the public but with specific interests. For example, shops can inform previous MUs about any special offers or sales just when they pass it by. These applications have mainly privacy issues rather than issues of performance, scalability or availability.

(c) Internal enterprise applications : Usually these applications are ap-plied inside an organisation or facility. For example, inventory tracking, personnel tracking and information retrieval. Most of these applications use certain hardware such as special mobile devices or take advantage of

2.2. Location-Based Services 21 the latest smart phones models that use the latest mobile technologies.

In this case the privacy of the employee should be taken into consid-eration, as well as protecting private internal data in a public mobile phone network by technical effort which is considered a challenge in such environments.

2. Purpose of Application

Another measure that used to classify the LBS is the main purpose of the designed applications. The reason for use would differ from one LBS applica-tion to another driving more constraints and technical issues. The navigaapplica-tion applications which are very common for routing are used widely to direct the MUs from a point of origin to a destination. Entertainment applications also use LBS as in many social games and social networks, these applications are designed to locate and tag MUs in different locations. Furthermore, many of the information service applications which are used to help tourist users to locate, for example, the closest hotel, bus or train station or best restaurant in the area would be other uses of LBS. Emergency services are used to inform potentially affected users of any medical or police emergencies within an area.

Business development aid information services employ the technology as in management chain and tracking shipment delivery or purchase.

3. Technical Features and Capabilities

Technical features of LBS applications would consider other main classifiers.

A number of examples are described as follow [37]:

(a) Point of retrieving location feature: Cellular communications net-works used to provide the position of the cellular based on transmission signals between the MU and the BS. This is considered as cellular network dependent, and this was before the appearance of GPS-enabled smart phones. Cellular network providers were responsible for supplying ex-posed location information to LBS developers. In new smart phones, the ability to determine their location is valid via GPS and digital compasses.

Using GPS consumes significant MU power so developers therefore avoid using it.

(b) Point of requests feature: In most of the LBS the services are reactive which means that provided after a request from the MU; i.e. the MU send queries and the application answers it. The other approach is proactive LBS in which the information is sent to MUs when they are approaching or entering certain locations.

(c) Point of data and processes recording feature: Usual LBS appli-cations work on storing or processing MU current or previously recorded location. As that is the case, the data is considered as a single data point. But in current LBSs, there are set of records that hold more than a single data point. For example, the route or location trace information, combined with speed and direction, all would be stored [38]. The goal of the extra information is to aid systems in predicting the future location of MUs, as well as supplying the service providers with all the historical information that may be needed to enhance services.

(d) Point of MU interaction feature : An LBS application would sup-port two kinds of MUs’ interaction in the sense of requests of a single MU application or multiple MU request applications. The first one con-sidered as “single - target application” where the second one may called

“multiple-target application” which is the current motivation in Web 2.0 and social networking applications.

(e) Point of collecting location feature : LBS applications depend on different technologies to collect location data which are different in ac-curacy. For example GPS would not be useful sometimes indoors since it depends on view of satellites. To overcome such problems other tech-nologies can be used such as cellular communications network or Wi-Fi.

These technologies are discussed in section 2.2.4.

2.2. Location-Based Services 23