A light-weight Framework for Location-based Services

Context-aware mobile systems aim at delivering information and services tailored to the current user's situation [1], [11]. One major application area of these systems is the tourism domain, not least since tourists can be assisted not only in the preparatory phase of a vacation but especially during the vacation itself through location-based services (LBS) [5], [8]. Consequently a proliferation of approaches [2], [3], [6], [9], [10], [14], [17], [19], [20] can be observed, whereby an in-depth study of related work has shown that some of these existing mobile tourism information systems exhibit few limitations [4], [21]: First, existing approaches often use proprietary interfaces to other systems (e.g. a Geographic Information Systems - GIS), and employ their own data repositories, thus falling short in portability and having to deal with time consuming content maintenance. Second, often thick clients are used, admittedly offering advantages like rich user functionality, but lacking out-of-the-box-usage. Third, existing solutions are sometimes inflexible concerning configuration capabilities of the system. To deal with those deficiencies, we present a domain independent, lightweight framework for location-based services. This framework builds on existing GIS standards, incorporates already available Web content, can be employed out-of-the-box, and is configurable by using a Web-based interface.