Location Based Services
Location Based Services

The knowledge of geographical location of users enables to exploit new services in areas of emergency, health, entertainment or work. The geographical location of the user is represented by user's spatial coordinates.

A service exploiting geographic information to serve a user is LBS (Location Based Services).

An example of location based services is a navigation service, tracking of people or vehicles (e.g., Latitude), geocaching, or tourist guide. Another important application of LBS is location in case of emergency (for example, location of car crash, injured person, etc.). In this case, the location of the person can be done automatically and required assistance can be navigated to the place without need for user intervention.

The concept of LBS requires architecture composed of five types of equipments:

- User device - provides interface between a user and the LBS system. The user device is usually a mobile equipment such as mobile phone, laptop, tablet, navigation device, etc.
- Communication network - is responsible for delivery of user's data and requests from the user device to the service provider and backward delivery of the obtained information from the system back to the user.
- Location (positioning) component: determines the user geographical position.
- LBS provider - offers services to the users and it is responsible for the processing user's requests.
- Content provider: supply LBS provider with a content, which is not stored by the LBS provider; it can be, for example, a map source, position of objects, information related to the objects, information on public transport, etc.

For efficient and profitable exploitation of LBS, the determination of the location by Location component is critical issue. Without precise location, the service ability of LBS would be limited. The location can be derived by several ways. The most common way is to exploit either a satellite positioning system or a mobile network. Both major approaches are described in the next sections.