Affiliations: Department of Computer Science, Hong Kong University
of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Hong Kong | Context-Aware Systems Department, Institute for
Infocomm Research, Singapore
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Context-Aware Systems Department,
Institute for Infocomm Research, 21 Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Singapore. E-mail:
dlee@cs.ust.hk, mlzhu@i2r.a-star.edu.sg, haibo@cs.ust.hk
Abstract: As location-based services (LBSs) grow to support a larger and
larger user community and to provide more and more intelligent services, they
must face a few fundamental challenges, including the ability to not only
accept coordinates as location data but also manipulate high-level semantics of
the physical environment. They must also handle a large amount of location
updates and client requests and be able to scale up as their coverage
increases. This paper describes some of our research in location modeling and
updates and techniques for enhancing system performance by caching and batch
processing. It can be observed that the challenges facing LBSs share a lot of
similarity with traditional database research (i.e., data modeling, indexing,
caching, and query optimization) but the fact that LBSs are built into the
physical space and the opportunity to exploit spatial locality in system design
shed new light on LBS research.
Keywords: location-based service, databases, mobile devices
