Location-based services have emerged as one of the major trends in ubiquitous
information delivery to mobile users. This talk will discuss some
characteristics of these services, focusing in particular on how they can manage
to bridge the semantic gap between the user request and the available data. The
main goal is to be able to provide information that is as relevant as possible
for the specific user who is querying the service. This means that user profiles
play an essential role, as well as an accurate description of which data is
available and corresponds to the current location of the mobile user. However,
specific knowledge about local context and generic knowledge about common
understanding of things also are essential components needed to realize
intelligent query answering under spatio-temporal constraints, which is what one
would expect from location-based services. |