Approaching location-based services from a place-based perspective: from data to services?

摘要

Despite the seemingly obvious importance of a link betweennotions of place and the provision of context in locationbasedservices (LBS), truly place-based LBS remain rare.Place is attractive as a concept for designing services as itfocuses on ways in which people, rather than machines,represent and talk about places. We review papers whichhave extracted place-relevant information from a variety ofsources, examining their rationales, the data sources used,the characteristics of the data under study and the ways inwhich place is represented. Although the data sources usedare subject to a wide range of biases, we find that existingmethods and data sources are capable of extracting a widerange of place-related information. We suggest categories ofLBS which could profit from such information, for example,by using place-related natural language (e.g. vernacular placenames)in tracking and routing services and moving thefocus from geometry to place semantics in location-basedretrieval. A key future challenge will be to integrate dataderived from multiple sources if we are to advance fromindividual case studies focusing on a single aspect of placeto services which can deal with multiple aspects of place.