2004 IRISH SCIENTIST YEAR BOOK

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Institute of Technology Tallaght
Aaron Hand
Location Based Services application development at IT Tallaght

SRF New York City on a futuristic 3G mobile device

The availability of location technology and the high ownership of wireless communication devices have created the next era of computing, the mobility era. Mobile computing offers the unique possibility of anywhere, anytime computing. The services that will dominate this billion-Euro market are Location Based Services (LBS). LBS have been identified as the 'next killer applications'. They are services that exploit where a wireless device is located. Typical LBS applications provide local geographical information about a service that the user wants to know, for example: 'Where is the closest cinema?' or 'How do I get back to the motorway from here?'. LBS are targeted for the new third generation (3G) wireless device. 3G wireless devices offer more sophisticated screen displays, faster Internet connection transfer speeds, and more user location accuracy then today's 2.5 generation wireless devices.

Research at the Department of Computing, Institute of Technology Tallaght, is being carried out on various aspects of LBS application development. The key research areas have been the development of an open standard architecture for LBS applications, the design of new development methodologies that will adapt to the mobile computing era, and the use of open source and standards to solve existing LBS application development problems.

The research carried out by the Department has identified potential problem areas in LBS application development. These problems include limitation of resources and small varying screens of wireless devices, the lack of a non-proprietary driven development architectures and methodologies, lack of LBS development tools, privacy and unsolicited wireless advertising issues, and the varying accuracy of different network location techniques.


Research Projects

Spatial Application Generic Environment System Standards (SAGESS) is an architecture platform for the development and deployment of wireless LBS applications, and the Spatial Application Generic Environment (SAGE) is an LBS development methodology for new LBS applications. Many different prototype LBS applications have been developed based on SAGESS and SAGE. The figure displays the result from the Service Route Finder (SRF) LBS prototype application: it demonstrates a service location request and shortest route calculation on New York City. The dynamically generated open sourced Scalable Vector Graphic (SVG) map images scale capability is also displayed.

Contact: Aaron Hand, Department of Computing, Institute of Technology Tallaght;
Tel: + 353 1 404 2000; Fax: + 353 1 404 2700;
E-mail: [email protected] ; Web: www.it-tallaght.ie