Towards the next generation of location-based services

Abstract

Research Academic Computer Technology Institute, Patras University Campus, GR-26500 Rio, Greece Location-based services (LBS) constitute an emerging application domain rapidly introduced in modern life habits. However, given that LBS already count a few years of commercial life, the services provided are rather naïve, not exploiting the current software capabilities and the recent research advances in the fields of spatial and spatio-temporal data management. The goal of this paper is to fill this gap by first presenting the next generation of locationbased services and then, demonstrating their implementation which takes advantage of both modern commercial software and state-of-the-art spatial network and spatio-temporal databases techniques. Novel techniques are also proposed in fields non-thoroughly addressed by the research community, such as the prediction of future position of objects moving on a road network. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.