Virtual Location-Based Services: Merging the Physical and Virtual World

Location-based services gained much popularity through providing users with helpful information with respect to their current location. The search and recommendation of nearby locations or places, and the navigation to a specific location are some of the most prominent location-based services. As a recent trend, virtual location-based services consider webpages or sites associated with a location as 'virtual locations' that online users can visit in spite of not being physically present at the location. The presence of links between virtual locations and the corresponding physical locations (e.g., geo-location information of a restaurant linked to its website), allows for novel types of services and applications which constitute virtual location-based services (VLBS). The quality and potential benefits of such services largely depends on the existence of websites referring to physical locations. In this paper, we investigate the usefulness of linking virtual and physical locations. For this, we analyze the presence and distribution of virtual locations, i.e., websites referring to places, for two Irish cities. Using simulated tracks based on a user movement model, we investigate how mobile users move through the Web as virtual space. Our results show that virtual locations are omnipresent in urban areas, and that the situation that a user is close to even several such locations at any time is rather the normal case instead of the exception

Low-Cost Bluetooth Mobile Positioning for Location-based Application

Bluetooth is a promising short-range radio network technology. We present a low cost and easily deployed, scalable infrastructure for indoor location-based computing of mobile devices based on Bluetooth technology. The system consists of 2 main components, namely the Bluetooth (BT) Sensor System and the Central Navigation System which have been developed using the JDK 6.0. The Bluetooth Sensor System allows mobile devices whose Bluetooth mode is set to discoverable, to be scanned and detected, and they receive customizable text message of their positioning information, e.g. room identity. The positioning information is also sent to the Central Navigation System which in turn displays and updates the navigation map. The system is also used to track the movement of different BT mobile devices within the implemented environment.Comment: 4 pages 3rd IEEE/IFIP International Conference in Central Asia on Internet 2007, ICI 200

RSSI Fingerprinting Approach for Location-Based Services

Location information is becoming increasingly important in many pervasive computing applications and it has been widely used in various industries as location aware that can provide functions such as navigation aids, geographic contextual information, movement tracking, emergency location, geographically selective communication and many other useful functions. The objective of this project is to implement Location Based Services (LBS) for medical facilities such as hospitals and asylums in order to improve their operations. For the first half of the project duration which is this semester, I mainly focus on the problem of localization. Therefore, based on my knowledge and developed tools in localization, I can further develop a locationbased service system. In order to performthis project, I will create a simulation whereby I will select one area probably my hostel house to study the problem of localization. My goal is to locate a person when she/he is walking around the house. To achieve the goal, we will encounter a lot of problems such as, how to collect the signals from the wireless access points, how to process the data, how to choose and apply the algorithm in order to use the collected signals and so on. Every problem mentioned will affectthe accuracy in localization. Therefore in this report, we will introduce how we can solve this problems