Connecting the Dots: Informing Location-Based Services of Space Usage Rules

Abstract

Today, a large set of location-based services exists and millions of people use these applications on a daily base. These services are capable of fulfilling and assisting with a variety of tasks, such as fetching points of interest or indicating friends nearby, performing web search requests, which respect the context of the user, or navigating to a destination point. Even though these are very helpful tools, most LBS perform simplistic ‘point-to-point’ queries. In this paper, we propose to extend the query types of current LBS and show how these also extend their potentials. We explain, why the absence of additional query types is an issue in certain cases, and summarize the work accomplished in this area. In addition, we concentrate on one usage domain which is missing in the majority of current LBS—information about space usage rules, e.g. ‘no smoking in the restaurant’ or ‘no dogs allowed in this park’ and illustrate these with various examples.