Position Paper for Position Dependent Information Services Feb 2000

Ravikanth Varahagiri

Wipro Technologies

No.271, Sri Ganesha Complex

Hosur Main Road, Madivala

Bangalore - 560 068. India.

Tel : 91-80-5539704

Fax : 91-80-5539701/5539702

Email: Ravikanth.Varahagiri@wipro.com

Perspective

Wipro Technologies is a Global Custom Software Solution Provider. Mobile Applications is one of our focus areas, where the Mobile world meets the Web. This position paper reflects our needs and ideas related to Position Dependant Information Services.

Background

Mobile Application Systems are connecting the Mobile devices to the WWW based applications. Mobile networks are deploying network infrastructure necessary to find the accurate position of mobile devices. This enables development of applications, which could provide better interface and information based on the location of the user.

There are two kinds of applications.

Applications which use the position information for navigational purposes. They need representation of points, routes, points-of-interest and relationships among these entities. In these systems there is large amount of structured positional data is sent from the application to mobile devices. Usually, these mobile device are special devices. They are not general-purpose mobile phones with mobile browsers.

Applications that provide personalized information based on user location. E.g. Restaurant guides, advertisements of shops when you are inside a shopping mall, specific advertisements and deals when you enter a specific shop in a shopping mall. A Guided tour in a tourist attraction etc. Usually, these applications are targeted to generic mobile phones

Requirements

Apart from representing points, routes and events. It should be possible to define logical relationships than exact position. E.g. Inside the office, near the station etc.

As there are large number of plain Mobile browsers already deployed, it is necessary to support these devices. It is necessary to define standard conversion methods between the new position representation to these mobile markup languages. This will enable inter-operability between multiple applications on the mobile phone and also use the telephony resources, phone book resources while access the position information.

Most of the mobile applications are usually outside the network service provider domain. It is necessary for the service provider to provide information to multiple applications. Hence, the protocol between the Service Provider and the Application should be scalable and lightweight.

As this communication is usually through open Internet, security and privacy are most important. These transports should use existing security systems to achieve necessary security levels. It should be possible for the service provider and user to control which class of applications will get the necessary location information. This will enable the user to control on which applications can get location information.

As a single user is expected to own and have multiple mobile devices, it will be ideal to find which is the mobile device the user is currently active on. This will enable the application to direct the notifications and Push to the current mobile device. Hence, apart from Position it should be possible to indicate the active presence of the user to the mobile application.

It should be possible for the Mobile Applications to Query the current position of a mobile device. This query should support relationship information between the mobile device and other entities in which the application is interested in.