Master

'

s Thesis 2006 

FACHHOCHSCHULE

HOCHSCHULE F

U

R

LI Hui 

STUTTGART

TECHNIK

Background 

        STUTTGART UNIVERSITY OF APPLIED 

SCIENCES 

2  Background 

2.1  Mobile application/Location based services 

2.1.1  Location based services 

Nowadays  the  telecom  industry  is  eying  at  the  marriage  of  geoinformation  services 

and  mobile  devices  in  the  form  of  Location  Based  Services  (LBS).

In  general  case, 

LBS  can  be  defined  as  services  utilizing  the  ability  to  dynamically  determine  and 

transmit  the  location  of  persons  within  a  mobile  network  by  the  means  of  their 

terminals. LBS provide specific, relevant information based on the current position to 

the user. The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC 2003) defined LBS as a wireless IP 

service  that  uses  geographic  information  to  serve  a  mobile  user  or  any  application 

service that exploits the position of a mobile terminal. 

LBS/Mobile applications cover many aspects linked to human mobility such as: 

Navigation, 

Health/Safety/Security/Emergency, 

Convenience, 

Entertainment, 

Travel Aids, 

Productivity Aids, 

Mobile Work Force Management etc

For an example a visitor want to find the nearest hotel, he needs nothing about names 

and addresses of those hotels which are within his reach, LBS will tell him the hotels 

in  say  1  sq.km  according  to  his  position,  selected  out  of  the  database  of  say  1000 

hotels in the city spread over 2000 sq.km. 

WMS can be chosen to use as server part of LBS, and one typical LBS system could 

be  the  followings:  The  user  has  one  instrument  (for  example,  GPS),  it  sends  the 

position  parameters  of  the  user  to  the  WMS  though  wireless  net,  and  the  WMS 

responses with the service according to the position, the data can be received from the 

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