Toward seamless indoor-outdoor applications: Developing stakeholder-oriented location-based services

Location-Based Services (LBS),an emerging new business based on smartphone and mobile networks,are becoming more and more popular.Most of these LBSs,however,only offer non-seamless indoor/outdoor applications and simple applications without giving stakeholders the chance to play an active role.Our specific aim is to solve these issues.This paper presents concepts to solve these issues by expanding the Open Location Services Interface Standard (OpenLS) to allow seamless indoor/outdoor positioning and to extend the content of the services to include information recommended by stakeholders.     

Expanding the SDI environment: comparing current spatial data infrastructure with emerging indoor location-based services

The authors compare key elements of the emerging field of Indoor Location-Based Services (Indoor LBS) to those currently found in spatial data infrastructure (SDI) programs. After a brief review of SDIs and Location-Based Services, the corresponding drivers, characteristics and emerging issues within the field of Indoor LBS are introduced and discussed. A comparative framework relates the two in terms of the criteria ‘People’, ‘Data', ‘Technologies', ‘Standards' and ‘Policies/Institutional Arrangements'. After highlighting key similarities and differences, the authors suggested three areas – definition of common framework datasets in Indoor LBS, more effective use of volunteered geographic information by SDI programs and development of appropriate privacy policies by both communities – that may benefit from sharing ‘lessons learned'.     

Big location‐based social media messages from China's Sina Weibo network: Collection,storage, visualization,and potential ways of analysis

China's social media platform, Sina Weibo, like Twitter, hosts a considerable amount of big data: messages, comments, pictures. Collecting and analyzing information from this treasury of human behavior data is a challenge, although the message exchange on the network is readable by everyone through the web or app interface. The official Application Programming Interface (API) is the gateway to access and download public content from Sina Weibo and is used to collect messages for all mainland China. The nearby_timeline() request is used to harvest only messages with associated location information. This technical note serves as a reference for researchers who do not speak Mandarin but want to collect data from this rich source of information. Ways of data visualization are presented as a point cloud, density per areal unit, or clustered using Density‐Based Spatial Clustering of Applications with Noise (DBSCAN). The relation of messages to census information is also given.