Handbook of Research on Geoinformatics - Hassan A. Karimi Part 10 doc

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Biometric Authentication in Broadband Networks for Location-Based Services

R eferences

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Reisman, J. G., & Thomopoulos, S. C. A. (1998).

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Thomopoulos, S. C. A., & Reisman, J. G. (1993).

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End Note

1 The project “Bioathletics” has been funded

by the General Secretariat of Research &

Technology (GSRT) of the Greek Ministry of

Development under the Contract AΘ 17+32

/ 2-10-2003.

This work was previously published in Secure E-Government Web Services, edited by A. Mitrakas, P. Hengeveld, D. Polemi,

and J. Gamper, pp. 84-96, copyright 2007 by IGI Publishing (an imprint of IGI Global).

433

Chapter XLVIII

Design and Implementation

Approaches for Location-Based,

Tourism-Related Services

George Kakaletris

University of Athens, Greece

Dimitris Varoutas

University of Athens, Greece

Dimitris Katsianis

University of Athens, Greece

Thomas Sphicopoulos

University of Athens, Greece

Copyright © 2009, IGI Global, distributing in print or electronic forms without written permission of IGI Global is prohibited.

Abstr act

The globally observed recession of mobile services market has pushed mobile network operators into

looking for opportunities to provide value added services on top of their high cost infrastructures. Recent

advances in mobile positioning technologies enable services that make use of the mobile user location

information, offering intuitive, attractive applications to the potential customer. Mobile tourism services

are among the primary options to be considered by service providers for this new market. This chapter

presents the key concepts, capabilities, and considerations of infrastructures and applications targeted

to the mobile tourist, covering data and content delivery, positioning, systems’ interactions, platforms,

protocols, security, and privacy as well as business modelling aspects.

434

Design and Implementation Approaches for Location-Based, Tourism-Related Services

Introduct ion

During the last decade of the 20th century, wire￾less data networks have invaded everyday life

and have gradually started taking over areas

traditionally considered as being only suited to

wired applications. Due to their versatility, wire￾less telecommunications systems have become a

widespread standard, leading to hardware price

drops and radical quality increases. Today there

exist a bunch of technologies that allow the deliv￾ery of information to mobile or wireless devices

and their users, all presenting different charac￾teristics in performance/ quality, autonomy and

cost. These technological advances accompanied

by the reach of the saturation level (Ellinger,

Barras, & Jackel, 2002; Gruber, 2005; Gruber &

Verboven, 2001) in the mobile telephony market

pushed hardware vendors and network and service

providers into looking for new business opportu￾nities. The needs of tourism-related information

provision and services were amongst the first to

be considered for new applications in the field of

communication devices.

In traditional fixed systems, the location of

a terminal and its user was a part of its identity

and remained constant for a long period during its

lifetime. In this new mobility era, this observation

no longer holds: the physical position of the user

might be highly variable, introducing a whole

new range of issues and opportunities to be taken

into account. The use of intelligent systems that

exploit the positional information of the client, ac￾companied by the ability to provide feedback over

a wireless medium, can lead to the provision of

innovative highly intuitive services that were not

available in the near past (Grajski & Kirk, 2003;

Kakaletris,Varoutas, Katsianis, Sphicopoulos, &

Kouvas, 2004; Rao & Minakakis, 2003; Staab &

Werthner, 2002; Yilin, 2000).

But, although mobile telephony networks offer

maximum mobility, they are not the only means

for providing location-based services (LBS) for

tourism. Local fixed wireless networks in their

various forms are another of the modern and

popular technologies facilitating relevant services.

In addition to telecommunication systems and

from a technological perspective, there are a wide

range of other systems such as global positioning

system (GPS) (Dana, 1994; ETSI, 2006; GAR￾MIN, n.d.), or ID tags (Bohn & Mattern, 2004;

Tarumi, Morishita, & Kambayashi, 2000) which

might have a significant role in the development

and deployment of e-tourism applications based

on location information.

This chapter presents the technological

concepts associated with the provision of loca￾tion-aware tourism-related services under a

service-oriented approach capable of supporting

open value chains and to lead financially viable

open and powerful communication systems. The

rest of the chapter is organised as follows: The

“Background” section presents the technologi￾cal and business background of location-based

services; the “Technology Overview” section

gets into details of the technological aspects and

issues raised in the domains of positioning and

data/content delivery, which are fundamental

elements of the examined class of services; the

section on “Mobile Tourism Services” captures

the specific needs and opportunities in the specific

application area and presents issues and consid￾erations with respect to integrating the various

parts into an open system capable of delivering

such services. In the “Conclusion,” technology

and market conclusions and trends are presented.

Finally, due to the large number of acronyms

and the frequency of their appearance, a table of

acronyms is provided at the end of the chapter in

order to ease reading through it (see Appendix).

Background

The application of the above-mentioned technolo￾gies and concepts in tourism gave birth to the

ubiquitous tourism1

concept (OTC, 2003), which

refers to the existence and access of tourism related

435

Design and Implementation Approaches for Location-Based, Tourism-Related Services

services at any place, any time. Although tour￾ism-related services are mostly related to content

provision, more applications can be identified.

In its entirety, content provision for e-tourism

covers a large number of thematic areas: culture,

urgencies, transportation, events, and so on. Thus,

content might be both temporally and spatially

labelled (LoVEUS, 2002; M-Guide, 2002). In

addition, information seeking and avalanche-like

content provision might guide the user to areas

quite outside her/his initial focus areas.

The information technology (IT), the Internet

and the mobile telecommunications revolutions of

the last decades of the 20th century made it possible

for enterprises to enable massive access to their

applications and data. Users are able to access

applications and information through a variety

of integrated “channels” including the Internet,

mobile telephony, and voice interfaces and thus

bring forward the concept of multi-channel ar￾chitectures. Consequently, multi-channel content

delivery and media-independent publishing have

emerged in order to address the demand for per￾sonalised content that can adapt to the end-user

device capabilities. Devices, such as PDAs, cel￾lular phones, smartphones, and television set-top

boxes, introduced the need for additional channels

for publishing content. The approach of maintain￾ing independent content sets per channel proved

to be highly inefficient in terms of maintenance,

until the wide adoption of eXtensible Markup

Language (XML) and related technologies,

such as eXtensible Stylesheet Language / XSL

Transformation (XSL/XSLT), offered a standard

solution to this challenge.

Technology is not the sole reason behind the

emergence of the ubiquitous tourism concept.

The existing 2/2.5G2

mobile market has reached

saturation as analysts have predicted, but its ef￾fects have only been acknowledged lately, due to

the high expectations of the emerging 3G3

mar￾kets. The costs of licensing (Andersson, Hulten,

& Valiente, 2005; Katsianis, Welling, Ylonen,

Varoutas, Sphicopoulos, Elnegaard, et al.,2001;

Yan 2004) and deployment of 3G networks led

mobile network operators4

(MNOs)into a global

recession era and a global pessimism for their

adoption which actually reflects user attitudes

towards the new standard. In order to confront

that, business opportunities based on existing

mobile and wireless networks have been further

investigated (Katsianis et al., 2001; Varoutas,

Katsianis, Sphicopoulos, Loizillon, Kalhagen,

& Stordahl, et al., 2003). The provision of value

added services over 2.5/3G networks not only al￾lows providers and users to make the most out of

the existing infrastructures, but also encourages

usage and drives expectations for the next gen￾eration of mobile networks (Varoutas, Katsianis,

Sphicopoulos, Stordahl, & Welling, 2006). To

provide such services, the integration of various

components and base-services is required, which

breaks the current status of most MNOs that have

traditionally been formed as almost monolithic

self-contained service(s) providers.

This need for integration of various market

stakeholders in complex business models aim￾ing for the provision of high quality services has

been indicated not only by mobile market analysts

but also by information systems architects. The

service-oriented approach (Brown, Johnston,

& Kelly 2003; Colan, 2004), a whole new IT

perspective which is rushing into the industry,

underlies the concepts and offers the guidelines

that render possible such complex collaboration

schemes. In the LBS domain, mobile positioning

protocol and mobile location protocol (Ericsson;

OMA, 2002) already exercise concepts in-line

with current service-oriented architectures (SOA)

common practices. Nevertheless, the design of

services, such as location-based ones, will always

have to face domain specific challenges concern￾ing technical, economical or even ethical and

social factors of the service application (Daoud

& Mohan 2002).

Nowadays it is possible and desirable to build

open systems that can support the delivery of

tourism-related location-dependent content to an

436

Design and Implementation Approaches for Location-Based, Tourism-Related Services

end-user on top of the technological and business

background already described, allowing:

• Seamless interoperability of systems and

content provided by several market stake￾holders towards providing a large range of

high-quality location-based content delivery

services, through standards and loosely

coupled elements

• Exploitation of state-of-the-art and future

technology in positioning, mobile devices,

and network infrastructures

• Compliance with requirements and stan￾dards for personalisation and quality of

service (QoS)

• Low-cost implementation and upgrade road￾map from 2/2.5G to 3G and other current

and future mobile and wireless networks

• Guarantees of privacy

As already mentioned, provision of tourism￾related content can be shown that covers a large

portion of the information that is usually delivered

through location-based services. A number of

studies already exist that focus on various aspects

of technologies, architectures and business models

of this area (Devine & Holmquist, 2001; EMILY,

2002; M-Guide, 2002). This chapter presents the

design aspects of such services in a generic way,

capturing the needs of many location-dependent

services since it assumes a highly heterogeneous

network infrastructure leveraged by the Internet

protocol (IP) layer. In this way, dealing with

the details of mobile or other wireless network

infrastructures is avoided yet interoperability

and integration issues are been identified and

investigated.

T echno logy O ver view

In the following sections the technologies involved

in the provision of mobile tourism services are

introduced. Connectivity, which essentially allows

delivering data to a device, and positioning, which

is the ability to locate a device and consequently

its user in space, are the fundamental enabling

technologies for the provision of location-based

services. Assuming these, tourism related infor￾mation could be delivered to devices capable of

presenting it (e.g., mobile phones), with a multitude

of options (quality, depth, size, etc.), derived from

exactly the same content that would drive tradi￾tional applications (Web sites, printed elements,

etc.). The driving force behind these is modern

software platforms and system architectures

that facilitate the creation of the various nodes

of a complex structure of collaborating service

elements.

W ireless and Mobile Data Services

Since the last decade of the 20th century and the

beginning of the 21st, the mobile user has come

to enjoy the provision of many technologies and

services that were hard to even imagine several

years before (Lin & Chlamtac, 2001). Besides

voice, some of the most common ones are:

• Information services (News, Directories,

Weather, Athletics, Financial, etc.)

• Entertainment (Chat & Flirt Services,

Guess who, Alerts, Horoscope, ringtones,

etc.)

• Communication tools (SMS, MMS, e-mail,

instant messaging, etc.)

Apart from these common services, a series

of other, more complex ones are being offered to

the user like navigation, local news, SMS vote,

microbilling, and so forth. Enabling these services

is achieved through various means the most im￾portant of which being the Web, SMS, and MMS.

These higher-level information exchange media

are based on lower level communication channels

offered by an infrastructure provider. The most

important ones are briefly described below: