User Profiles in Location-based Services: Make Humans More Nomadic and Personalized
Résumé
The rapid expansion of WWW has unobtrusively influenced humans' socio-economical life patterns in the last decade. With the development of portable phones, PDAs and laptops, Humans cannot be satisfied anymore simply by rich and exact access to the information. They look today for the more dynamic and personalized services on the move. Thus, the ubiquitous computing approach [1] is becoming emergent and popular. As one of its significant components, especially due to its dynamical characteristics of the space, time and contexts, location-based services (LBS) [2][3][4] emphasize the ability to take into account the spatial, temporal and contextual characteristics of their interactions with the users to provide the most appropriate service based on the local environment. Their location-centric approach distinguishes them from the traditional research on web information retrieval and personal navigation [5][6]. A key point of improving LBS is how to tailor the contents and representation to individual's specific spatio-temporal context. In the literature, some research [6][7][8] has been using user profiles in information filtering. In this paper1, we attempt to flexibly specify the user profiles in XML Schema, and then apply them to refine the queries considering the particular space and time constraints, finally make the mapping between the pre-processed query and data. Simply stated, the user profile serves as a bridge between the generic queries from the diverse users and the heterogeneous data.