Service broker architecture: Location business case and mashups

In recent years, costly and slow integration has created an unnecessary gap between the telephone companies (or telco) and IT worlds. However, collaboration between Internet and telecom standards is essential for future development. The service broker concept has been developed to fill this gap. Indeed, the service broker provides a flexible layer in the telecom architecture to bridge these two worlds. Such a concept is essential to coordinate the diverse future services and provide mashup opportunities through a single point of entry. In this article we present the concept and an actual implementation of a specific service broker: a location service broker. Moreover, we also present a sample mashup called MoPoint that we implemented to better demonstrate the functionality of the location service broker. MoPoint is a Web site where the user can see the current location of his or her mobile displayed on a map along with local weather and advertisements.