LORE: An infrastructure to support location-aware services

With the advance in wireless Internet and mobile computing, location-based services (LBS)—the capability to deliver location-aware content to subscribers on the basis of the positioning capability of the wireless infrastructure—are emerging as key value-added services that telecom operators can offer. To support efficient and effective development and deployment of innovative location-aware applications, a flexible and resilient middleware should be built as the enabling infrastructure. This paper presents the research and efforts made in the IBM China Research Laboratory toward developing an infrastructure that supports location-aware services. This infrastructure is based on a proposed location operating reference model (LORE), which addresses many major aspects of building location-aware services, including positioning, location modeling, location-dependent query processing, tracking, and intelligent location-aware message notification. Three key components of the infrastructure—the location server, a moving object database, and a spatial publish/subscribe engine—are introduced in detail. The location server has a common location adapter framework that supports heterogeneous positioning techniques and industry-standard location application program interfaces (APIs). The moving object database manages the location stream and processes the location-based queries. The spatial publish/subscribe engine enables intelligent location-aware message notification. We also present some location-aware application demonstrations that leverage the LORE infrastructure. Part of our work has been tested in pilot projects with leading carriers in China and has been integrated into the IBM WebSphere® Everyplace® Suite.