Location management for mobile devices

Abstract

Location-awareness, in the form of location information about clients and location-based services provided by servers, is becoming increasingly important for networked communications in general, and wireless and mobile devices in particular. The current fragmented landscape of location concepts and location-awareness, however, is not suitable for handling location information on a Web scale. Providing users with mechanisms which allow them to control how they want to expose their location information, and thus allow control over how to share location information with others and services, is a crucial step for better location management for mobile devices. This paper presents a concept for representing location vocabularies, matching and mapping them, how these vocabularies can be used to support better privacy for users of location-based services, and better location sharing between users and services. The concept is based on a language for describing place name vocabularies, which we call ldquoplace markup language (PlaceML)rdquo, and on various ways how these vocabularies can be used in a location-aware infrastructure of networked devices.