Location services are starting from the 1970s, the U.S. Department of Defense has been operating the global positioning system (GPS), a satellite infrastructure serving the positioning of people and objects. Initially, GPS was conceived for military purposes, but the U.S.
government decided in the 1980s to make the system's positioning data freely available to other industries worldwide. A location-based service can be defined as an information service provided by a device that knows where it is, and modifies the information it provides accordingly (Spiekermann, 2004).
Location-based services (LBS) are a general class of computer application services.
Which is a kind of information service. They are used in the field of commercial and consumer marketing. Mobile phones and the Internet have revolutionized the communication and with it the lifestyle of people. An increasing number of mobile phones and tablet pc allow people to access the Internet where ever they are and whenever they want. The advances in portable devices and wireless communication technologies enables a new form of services named location based services (Location-based service, 2014).
Here, I would like to introduce “Taipei e-bus system” (Department of Transportation, 2014), which is a good demonstration of location-based service with Big Data. That is why I am going to take a further study about the Location-based service with Big Data. Following paragraph are the description about the detail.
The Taipei e-bus system is defined by a specific service schedule, and it makes designated stops. Each bus driver is required to transmit his/her current bus location to the GIS server on schedule in order to notify passengers and management in search of bus location services. The current bus location features a real-time signifier, when the bus approaches the next stop, the built-in direction-orientation mechanism will notify the network control center, allowing passengers to acquire the current bus information either online, or via their PDA’s and mobile phones. Fleet managers can also easily keep tracks of all buses operating in Taipei.
Taipei’s public transit system is extremely well developed, it covers practically every possible destination with relatively few transfers. The "Taipei e-bus System" is established by the Department of Transportation, Taipei City Government. The system is named “Tele Point-2100”, It is a wonderful e-bus system in the ITS industry. The basic idea of the Tele point - 2100 can solve the problem on the issue of oil resource. The system is the most accurate, most
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advance system that can provide real time information useful in the daily life of the ever changing cities. Blow figure is the system diagram of Taipei e-bus system (Department of Transportation, 2014).
Figures 1-1 Taipei e-bus system diagram
Source: Department of Transportation of Taipei Government, 2014
Over the past ten years location-based services (LBS) have been variously adopted as popular technology; as the killer application that will bring the GPS industry to its next level of prosperity. This research attempts to provide a professional introduction to LBS, and a discussion of some major issues surrounding them.
Since then mobility has become an increasingly important factor in digital devices, and we expect to develop a devices which are high performance available. Mobility has in turn opened up the possibility of providing information about the user’s location in space and time, about the user’s surroundings, and about features in the environment that are nearby but beyond the user’s own sensory perception (Goodchild, 2009).
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The concepts described in this research range from general application-related concepts to technical aspects. We use an outside-in approach, reaching from a general use of the application—inside to the data management technical levels. Including data feature, source, type, and analysis. Moreover, all of the concepts described in this research are illustrated using a reference application given at the following section. In order to make location applications work, the industry had already overcome several challenges of both a technological and economic nature over the past years (Schiller & Voisard, 2004).
From previous section, this research has presented a good demonstration of location-based service. But, how do I have motivation to do this further study. First of all, I would like to show some data from Taipei e-bus system. And, understanding how the data management is so important for e-bus system.
Source: Department of Transportation of Taipei Government, 2014
From the data of table, we already knew the location-based service generated huge number of data. And the data are so jealousy to manager team. The most commonly used e-bus information system approach to the "Watch the stop sign LED marquee" 95.5% of the maximum, 82.1 percent of bus passengers expressed satisfaction with the e-bus information system (Department of Transportation, 2014).
It is a very successful system of location-based service with big data. The governors are proud of this system. The civilizations are eager to use this system. This system has been expanded to other cities and counties, so that the results can be spread throughout the country
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of world wide.
GPS provides the simplest and most obvious form of LBS, allowing a user to determine position on the Earth’s surface, in the precise coordinates of a formally specified location, to within meters and in some cases centimeters (Kennedy, 2002; Leick, 2004). The U.S. Global Positioning System was originally developed for military purposes, with only a degraded signal available to civilians. But a change of policy in the 1990s opened full accuracy to all, and today GPS is used worldwide as a free, ubiquitous means of determining position. It is based on comparing the timing of signals arriving from that subset of a constellation of 24 satellites that is above the user’s horizon (Spiekermann, 2004).
A next-generation wireless technology will be able to track the behavior of individual customers from internet, update their position, and model their behavior in real time. If the data can be analyzed and managed. Which are the core value of this research. Data collection and mining, as well as system interoperability, are the prime focuses of this research. Big Data will help to create new growth opportunities and entirely new categories of companies. The use of Big Data is becoming a crucial way for leading companies to outperform their peers. In most industries, established competitors will leverage data-driven strategies (McGuire et al., 2012).
1.3 Research Objective
Location-based services have been used for many years. There is a growing need for mobile data management teams, which are able to store, manipulate, retrieve, most importantly, manage the large quantities of geo-referenced data that are available today. Based on the nature of the research objective, different research methods have been adopted to address different issues. In view of the problem statement and research questions, the study will interpret the questions asked and motivate the benefits of using mobile devices (Kock, 2003).
We now discuss in more detail the research issues. Which are going to be investigated in the following chapter. The research questions are:
1) What kind of LBS data features can be collected?
2) How can the big volume of LBS data be analyzed?
3) How do firm interpret the data and make use of findings?
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1.4 Research Process
To meet the goals and answer the research questions (which were described in previous section 1.3). The research process followed five steps of below Table 1-2.
Flow Chart Description
Identify factors that could improve location-based services.
Proposing asked question.
Literature data collect and data analysis.
Examine how LBS data collected and can be analyzed to generate valuable data.
Study cases of location-based services in current market.
Develop lesson learned from LBS cases.
Table 1-2 Research flow chart
Most of location-based services are built for outdoor applications. Since positioning technology covers everything from short-range wireless technology to wide area mobile device.
This study focuses on a particular application, based on mobile and handheld devices, from wireless Internet and Global Positioning Systems (Wang, 2008).
Research Objectives
Literature Review
Content Analysis
Cases Study
Results and Conclusions
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