Location Based Services

GEOG 288MR, Winter 10, 2-4 credits

Instructor: Dr. Martin Raubal, raubal@geog.ucsb.edu
Office (hours): Wednesday 3-4:30pm, EH 5713
Class meets: Wednesday 5-8pm, EH5824

Course description: Increased mobility has affected many areas of our daily lives, such as travel, communication, consumerism, social behavior, and the environment. Mobile people face challenging problems in space and time. These problems need to be solved on the spot, such as navigating an unfamiliar city or deciding on the fastest public transportation mode to a destination. Location Based Services (LBS) support people in their spatio-temporal decision-making based on information that is tied to their location. These services allow a user to query a location from a mobile terminal, such as a mobile phone or personal digital assistant, and to exploit spatial information about the user’s surrounding environment, such as his/her proximity to other entities in space. In this seminar we cover both theoretical and practical aspects of LBS. Topics include mobile decision-making and personalization; LBS architectures and positioning; LBS applications such as navigation services, mobile guides, emergency services, and location based social networking; and privacy and security. The seminar will mainly consist of readings and discussions, but students will also get some hands-on experience in designing, using, and evaluating LBS.

Required reading: Literature for the course is supplied online by the instructor (through class webpage). Weekly readings are listed below. Please come to class prepared to discuss the readings, which are listed for that day.

Grades: Grades will be determined by your presentation and lead of discussion (35%), the written assignments (35%), and your general class participation (30%). Class participation is mandatory.

Written assignments: The written assignments consist of brief critical commentaries (not longer than 1 page each) and your questions connected to the readings. You should have prepared at least 3 questions (possibly related to your own field of study) that can be discussed in the weekly sessions. You must hand in a printed version to the instructor at the beginning of each session. Late assignments will not be accepted and count as failed.

Weekly schedule and readings

Week 1, 5 January 2010: Introduction (slides)

R. Harris (2006) Between Hot Air and Hot Spot: Placing Location Based Services within GIScience. Transactions in GIS 10(1): 1-4. (Intro to special issue: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/tgis.2006.10.issue-1/issuetoc)

Week 2, 12 January 2010: LBS & Spatial Cognition – Cognitive Surveyor (Drew Dara-Abrams)

D. Dara-Abrams (2008) Cognitive surveying: A framework for mobile data collection, analysis, and visualization of spatial knowledge and navigation practices. in: C. Freksa, N. Newcombe, P. Gärdenfors, and S. Wölfl (Eds.), Spatial Cognition VI - Learning, Reasoning, and Talking about Space. Proceedings of the International Conference Spatial Cognition 2008, Freiburg, Germany. LNCS 5248, pp. 138-153, Springer, Berlin.
K.-F. Richter, D. Dara-Abrams, and M. Raubal (2010) Navigating and Learning with Location Based Services: A User-Centric Design. 7th International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography. G. Gartner and Y. Li. Guangzhou, China, 261-276.

Week 3, 19 January 2010: Key issues (interactive pdf)

(Bo Romero, bo_romero@umail.ucsb.edu)

J. Raper, G. Gartner, H. Karimi, and C. Rizos (2007) A critical evaluation of location based services and their potential. Journal of Location Based Services 1(1): 5-45.
R. Ahas and Ü. Mark (2005) Location based services - new challenges for planning and public administration? Futures 37: 547-561.

Week 4, 26 January 2010: LBS architectures & positioning, LBS market

(Ninghua Wang, n_wang@umail.ucsb.edu)

A. Brimicombe and B. Li (2009) Location-Based Services and Geo-Information Engineering. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK: Chapters 4.6 LBS Architecture & 6 Locating the User
A. Khurri and S. Luukkainen (2009) Identification of preconditions for an emerging mobile LBS market. Journal of Location Based Services 3(3): 188-209.

Week 5, 2 February 2010: Applications I (presentation)

(Grant KcKenzie, grantmckenzie@umail.ucsb.edu)

J. Raper, G. Gartner, H. Karimi, and C. Rizos (2007) Applications of location-based services: a selected review. Journal of Location Based Services 1(2): 89-111.
M. Arikawa, S. Konomi, and K. Ohnishi (2007) Navitime: Supporting Pedestrian Navigation in the Real World. Pervasive Computing 6(3): 21-29.
A. Cheok, K. Goh, W. Liu, F. Farbiz, S. Fong, S. Teo, Y. Li, and X. Yang (2004) Human Pacman: a mobile, wide-area entertainment system based on physical, social, and ubiquitous computing. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing 8: 71–81.

Week 6, 9 February 2010: Mobile decision-making and personalization (presentation)

(Tim Niblett, tniblett@umail.ucsb.edu)

M. Raubal (2009) Cognitive Engineering for Geographic Information Science. Geography Compass 3(3): 1087–1104.
J. Dillemuth, K. Goldsberry, and K. Clarke (2007) Choosing the scale and extent of maps for navigation with mobile computing systems. Journal of Location Based Services 1(1): 46–61.
C. Rinner (2008) Mobile Maps and More - Extending Location-Based Services with Multi-Criteria Decision Analysis. in: L. Meng, A. Zipf, and S. Winter (Eds.), Map-Based Mobile Services. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography pp. 335-352, Springer, Berlin.

Week 7, 16 February 2010: Mobile Human Computer Interaction & User Interfaces (presentation)

(Micah Brachman, micah_brachman@umail.ucsb.edu)

J. Paay and J. Kjeldskov (2008) Understanding the user experience of location-based services: five principles of perceptual organisation applied. Journal of Location Based Services 2(4): 267-286.
L. Chittaro (2010) Distinctive aspects of mobile interaction and their implications for the design of multimodal interfaces. Journal of Multimodal User Interfaces (3): 157–165.
S. Kim, R. Maciejewski, K. Ostmo, E. Delp, T. Collins, and D. Ebert (2008) Mobile analytics for emergency response and training. Information Visualization 7: 77-88.

Week 8, 23 February 2010: Context in LBS (presentation)

(Heather Burte, hburte@umail.ucsb.edu)

M. Raubal and I. Panov (2009) A Formal Model for Mobile Map Adaptation. in: G. Gartner and K. Rehrl (Eds.), Location Based Services and TeleCartography II - From Sensor Fusion to Context Models. Selected Papers from the 5th International Symposium on LBS & TeleCartography 2008, Salzburg, Austria. Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography pp. 11-34, Springer, Berlin.
C. Li and K. Willis (2006) Modeling Context Aware Interaction for Wayfinding using Mobile Devices. in: MobileHCI'06, September 12–15, 2006, Helsinki, Finland.
M. Rohs, J. Schöning, M. Raubal, G. Essl, and A. Krüger (2007) Map Navigation with Mobile Devices: Virtual versus Physical Movement with and without Visual Context. in: Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI 2007), 12-15 November 2007, Nagoya, Japan. pp. 146-153, ACM Press

Week 9, 2 March 2010: Applications II (presentation)

(Norma Savage, normasavage@umail.ucsb.edu)

J. Schöning, B. Hecht, M. Rohs, and N. Starosielski (2007) WikEar − Automatically Generated Location-Based Audio Stories between Public City Maps. in: 9th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing Demo Proceedings.
C. Li and P. Longley (2006) A Test Environment for Location-Based Services Applications. Transactions in GIS 10(1): 43-61.
M. Espeter and M. Raubal (2009) Location-based decision support for user groups. Journal of Location Based Services 3(3): 165-187.

Week 10, 9 March 2010: Privacy & testing (presentation)

(Frederik Loock, frederik_loock@hotmail.com)

C. Bettini, S. Mascetti, and S. Wang (2008) Privacy Threats in Location-Based Services. Encyclopedia of GIS. S. Shekhar and H. Xiong (Eds.). Springer.
J. Dobson and P. Fisher (2003) Geoslavery. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (Spring 2003).
R. Schusteritsch, C. Wei, and M. LaRosa (2007) Towards the Perfect Infrastructure for Usability Testing on Mobile Devices. in: CHI 2007, April 28 – May 3, 2007, San Jose, California, USA, pp. 1839-1844.

Further references:

A. Brimicombe and B. Li (2009) Location-Based Services and Geo-Information Engineering. Wiley-Blackwell, Chichester, UK.
J. Dillemuth (2009) Navigation tasks with small-display maps: The sum of the parts does not equal the whole. Cartographica 44: 187-200.
P. Kiefer, M. Raubal, and C. Schlieder (2010) Time Geography Inverted: Recognizing Intentions in Space and Time. in: A. El Abbadi, D. Agrawal, M. Mokbel, and P. Zhang (Ed.), 18th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS 2010), San Jose, California, USA, pp. 510-513.
K. Kolodziej and J. Hjelm (2006) Local Positioning Systems: LBS Applications and Services. CRC Press.
A. Küpper (2005) Location-Based Services - Fundamentals And Operation. Wiley, Chichester, England.
A. Parush, S. Ahuvia, and I. Erev (2007) Degradation in Spatial Knowledge Acquisition When Using Navigation Systems. in: S. Winter, M. Duckham, L. Kulik, and B. Kuipers (Ed.), Spatial Information Theory - 8th International Conference, COSIT 2007, Melbourne, Australia, September 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4736, pp. 238-254, Springer, Berlin.
M. Raubal, S. Winter, S. Teßmann, and C. Gaisbauer (2007) Time geography for ad-hoc shared-ride trip planning in mobile geosensor networks. ISPRS Journal of Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing 62(5): 366-381.