A declarative approach to a user-centric markup language for location-based services

摘要

Location-based Services are gaining more and more users and are available on a broad set of mobile devices. Due to their complexity such services are currently only provided by large organizations that use their own proprietary specifications thus leaving the full potential untapped. As seen during the development of the World Wide Web a tremendous growth can be achieved by enabling end-users to create services on their own. In this paper we present a platform independent markup language comprising a tool box of standard functions allowing end-users to easily design and exchange innovative location-based services. Besides its simplicity it also enables larger organizations to describe more sophisticated location-based services and run them on different platforms. The language supports event based triggers, like entering a zone, as well as temporal constraints, flow control and stateful services. The created code is human readable thus its executed actions are completely transparent to the user.It is interpreted by a generic parser on the mobile device managing the positioning process and performing actions like notifying the user or executing 3rd party applications.