Wireless campus LBS: Building campus-wide location based services based on wifi technology

Abstract

This chapter describes a project that has started in spring 2005 at the University of Twente (UT) in cooperation with the International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) to provide Location Based Services (LBS) for the UT campus. This LBS runs on the existing Wireless Campus system that provides the whole 140 hectare University grounds with WiFi based internet access. The project serves as a testbed for research activities as well as an infrastructure to develop practical use cases upon. The former includes research into wireless LAN positioning techniques, into context awareness of ubiquitous data management systems, and into data dissemination for LBS and mobile applications. A first use case was to provide the participants of SVGopen2005, the 4th Annual Conference on Scalable Vector Graphics (August 15-18, 2005) with a location system (called FLAVOUR) to help them navigate the conference locations and locate fellow attendants.