Towards Spatial Information Services in LBS: A GML-Based Approach

Abstract

Location based service (LBS) is becoming one of the most promising application with the rapid development of wireless communication, mobile computing, and location positioning technologies. Now Geography Markup Language (GML) is emerging as the de facto standard in representing and exchanging geographic information that includes both the spatial and non-spatial properties of geographic features over the Internet. GML provides an open, vendor-neutral framework for the definition of geospatial objects, which makes it much more interoperable to use GML to integrate various sources of spatial data in LBS. This paper discusses the service discovery and spatial operation issues when using GML to enhance the performance of LBS based on web service. The architecture includes back-end database server, local spatial information server, global spatial information server, and J2ME client; the server adopts two-tie architecture, which includes global spatial information service and local spatial information service; the client is to access the remote spatial information service in all kinds of mobile terminals, and displays the contents of LBS services information. The prototype shows that this approach is feasible and efficient.