Affiliations: Department of Informatics and Telecommunications,
National Kapodistrian University of Athens, Ilisia, Athens 15784, Greece.
Tel.: +302107275327; Fax: +302107275601; E-mail:
{iprigg,d.spanoydakhs,mspan,shadj}@di.uoa.gr
Abstract: Location Based Services can be considered as one of the most rapidly
expanding fields of the mobile communications sector, with an impressively
large application range. The proliferation of mobile/wireless Internet and
mobile computing, and the constantly increasing use of handheld, mobile devices
and position tracking technologies prepared the grounds for the introduction of
this new type of services. The combination of position fixing mechanisms with
location-dependent, geographical information, can offer truly customized
personal communication services through the mobile phone or other type of
devices. Prompted by the avalanche of technology advances in the aforementioned
areas in this paper we present an integrated platform for delivering Location
Based Services (LBS). The platform covers the full life cycle of a LBS starting
from the specification of the service, covering issues like the deployment and
maintenance of services, the service invocation and the final delivery of the
produced results to the invoking user. A prototype implementation of the
discussed platform was developed and used to perform a series of trial
services, with the purpose of demonstrating the pursued functionality.
Keywords: Location Based Services (LBS), positioning, GIS, middleware, software architecture
