Location-based services - past, present and future

Abstract

Location-based services hold great potential in the future of mobile computing. Up till the present time, all applications aiming to provide these services to consumers were custom developed with very little support for the special technological challenges lying ahead of developers. Beside this problem, the possibility of using several location-based services at once is needed. Users need to be able to have singlesign-on (SSO) capability and a common control set to effectively use these applications in a customized fashion. The rapid spread of social networking applications has had a great effect in today’s computing environment. Using social networks in location-based
services creates a new environment for these applications. The ability to locate the user can be spread across multiple social (or commercial) networks at once. This enables the development of a new generation of location-based services: not only can these applications be interconnected, they can also be customized to any user-group within social networks. These possibilities create technological challenges to developers: integrating a common map-base with social networking and GPS data transport is vital.