Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
Importance of GIS in LBS
Everything happens in some place in a single time. Because of this,
geographically referenced data is important, and thanks to the actual
mobile technology, currently it is widely used and it is becoming the key
to better decision-making in business and activities of daily living related
to location.
A study by the Pew Internet and American Life Project (Mashable 2012)
has determined that about 74% of smartphone users use location services
for information on what is around them; and one out of fi ve (18%) checks
for local businesses such as restaurants or theatres. Thus, we could say
that people are interested in things near their location. This was already
stated in the year 1970 by Tobler, who presented his fi rst Law (Tobler 1970):
“everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related
than distant things”.
To satisfy the need to know what is happening near the user, services
that use his or her position to deliver information have been developed,
which are called Location Based Services (LBS). GIS provides the basic tools
that make LBS functionally possible (Frank et al. 2004). Thus, LBS systems
can be considered as specialized GIS (Virrantaus et al. 2001). In addition,
the paper of McKee et al. (2002) explains that the introduction of LBS has
also further increased the importance of GIS within today's society. From
a business-to-business perspective LBS enables more effective “real time”
data collection, improving data base accuracy and ultimately delivering a
more effi cient service to the end customer. For all these reasons, location
and the knowledge about the things around the user are becoming of great
interest and make appear
location-aware systems for geographic applications
.
Location-Aware Systems for Geographic Applications
The increasing number of smartphones equipped with multiple sensors
and the ability to use different connection networks, have opened several
possibilities to the deployment of novel and exciting context-aware mobile
systems (Adomavicius and Tuzhilin 2011; Poveda et al. 2010). On the
other hand, the use of LBS within smartphones provides the geographical
context to the applications. Therefore, the combination of smartphones, GIS
technologies and LBS adds a new context,
location-aware systems.
Location-aware systems provide information on the user's environment
in a given time and position, which can help people to get aware about
their environment. Hence, the deployment of these systems in a tourism
application could provide a lot of benefi ts. These systems deployed in
smartphones result in location-based information, that, for example, allow
the user to search for the nearest restaurant or store; provide information
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