Geographical Information System-supported location based services: Seamless content & functionality integration using web services

The rapid growth in mobile Internet market worldwide has shown a promising future for the m-commerce services and applications such as location-based services (LBS). Geographical information system (GIS) always play an integral role in LBS systems. However, it also introduces high entry cost for LBS developers. This has resulted in slower growth of LBS. The recent emergence of Web services technology provides a possible solution to overcome the high GIS's cost issue. This research proposed a GIS Web services architecture based on SOAP, XML and HTTP. A prototype is developed to expose GIS functionalities through standard Web interface. It is implemented using Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003, Oracle Spatial 10g database, Oracle MapViewer, and other supporting tools. The proposed Web services approach is found to be practical and promises a lowering of the entry barrier to adopt GIS for LBS development.