Federating location-based data services

Abstract

With the emerging availability of small and portable devices which are able to determine their position and to communicate wirelessly, mobile and spatially-aware applications become feasible. These applications rely on information that is bound to locations and managed by so-called location-based data services. Large-scale location-based systems have to cope efficiently with different types of data (mostly spatial or conventional). Each type poses its own requirements to the data server that is responsible for management and provisioning of the data. In addition to efficiency, it is overly important to provide for a combined and integrated usage of that data by the applications. In this paper we discuss various basic technologies to achieve a flexible, extensible, and scalable management of the context model and its data organized and managed by the different data servers. Based on a classification of location-based data services we introduce a service-oriented architecture that is built on a federation approach to efficiently support location-based applications. Furthermore, we report on the Nexus platform that realizes a viable implementation of that approach. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.