Relative Location Oriented Mobile LBS

Mobile location-based services (LBS) usually define locations in an absolute way, mainly coordinates. However, this absolute presentation of location rarely appears in the context of daily life. Instead, people tend to use relative location, defined on the basis of a location with relation to other locations. Research in cognitive geography also imply that relative location is closer to the human cognitive model. We suggest that this discrepancy between the understanding of "location" from the human being side and the machine side acts as a major intrinsic cause of many problems shown in today's LBS, such as usability, accessibility or privacy issues. In this paper, benefits of taking advantages of relative location information are discussed. A framework of relative location orientated social networking is proposed by analyzing location related human knowledge and activities. To reveal potential challenges, a prototype is proposed and evaluated.