A vision for micro and macro location aware services

Abstract

A few decades ago, the Internet was created. Since then, searching for information and services has increased exponentially. With the introduction of GPS-enabled devices, a special type of search appeared offering location-aware services. These services customize search results based on users' location. This includes, but not limited to, (1) service finding, e.g., "find the nearest pizza restaurant", (2) routing, e.g., "obtain the shortest path from a user's home to the airport", (3) transportation, e.g., "what are the bus links to get a user from downtown to the mall", and (4) monitoring, e.g., "alert a parent if their child school-bus deviates from its regular route". Though new hardware and software technologies such as smart watches, voice search, and big-data platforms have been introduced and widely used, each single type of the above services has benefited very little from these technologies. On the local level of each service (the micro level), a full-fledged view is still missing. On the global level of all service types (the macro level), all Location-aware services are still acting as isolated islands and a global optimized service is not available. This paper presents our vision of how to provide an integrated macro location-aware service that acts harmoniously, and how each micro service can be further improved by better incorporation of novel technologies. We also overview the key challenges associated with these suggested improvements. Then, we highlight the potential value-added by the application of our vision.