PALASS: A Portable Application for a Location-Aware Social System

摘要

In this paper we present PALASS, a location-aware framework for portable handheld devices based on the Google Android platform. Location-aware systems are context-sensitive systems that provide information based on current location. We expand this model to include a social dimension where events are shared among users of social groups and are graphically displayed using maps in Android handheld devices. The framework is built as a web service supporting the dynamic addition of geographically-located social events, which are automatically filtered according to the group affiliations of each user. To emphasize the implementation-independence of this approach, the framework defines roles for different functionalities, each with clearly defined tasks that simplify the overall interface of the system. Other location-aware systems are also explored to show how they relate to the PALASS framework.