An architecture for location aware applications

Abstract

This paper presents an architecture for location aware applications, where positioning sources such as GPS, WaveLAN and Bluetooth devices can be seamlessly interchanged or even combined to achieve a more accurate positioning service with a higher availability than a single positioning source could provide. The architecture also supports peer-to-peer communication to allow clients to interchange position information over a local wireless network such as Bluetooth or WaveLAN. This enables a user to use other users position sources if their clients are close enough. The position information can be used directly by an application or be combined with habitual and other contextual information to achieve more personalized applications.A generic positioning protocol for interchange of position information between position sources and client applications is introduced and different techniques for merging of position information are presented. The interfaces for an application to access the platform and the platform to communicate with positioning sources are also discussed. The paper finally touches on privacy issues and outlines a schema for handling positioning information by using contracts that are easily maintained and controlled by the user.

Access control models for geo-social computing systems

“…Spatially aware access control mechanisms can be traced back to [19,5] (which address the information sharing concerns of satellite images in Geographical Information Systems) or [33,42] (which propose architectures for locationbased applications in wireless local networks).…”

“…There has been a growing body of literature on spatially aware access control models [19,5,33,42,27,10,11,16,34,2,6,21,1,30]. Building on these insights, this study of GSCSs aspires to further our understanding of spatiallyaware access control in two areas.…”

The PoSIM middleware for translucent and context-aware integrated management of heterogeneous positioning systems

“…In order of increasing level of visibility, the Alipes architecture focuses on the integration of heterogeneous positioning systems through appropriate wrappers to provide LBSs with a uniform API [8]. The goal is to force the exploitation of the available positioning system that best fits LBS accuracy requirements, by possibly performing location data fusion in order to achieve the required robustness of positioning data.…”

Enriched Media-Experience of Sport Events

“…The system is built on a context-aware platform, Alipes [20] and wireless Internet enabled sensor nodes [36] developed at Luleå University of Technology. Other research conducted on context-aware platforms includes the the work by Dey et al on the Context Toolkit [9] and the work by Romàn et al on Gaia [26].…”

“…Alipes [20], the platform used in this project, is one such platform. It was originally developed for location aware applications but has been extended with support for other types of contexts; altitude, pulse, speed, and distance, for the purpose of conducting this test.…”