Location semantics in positioning services

Location is the basis of location-based services. From the point of view of semantics, mining potential knowledge of locations can provide valuable information for intelligent and adaptive location application services. In this paper, location obtained by mobile positioning system is abstracted as physical location and geographic location. A new definition of semantic location is put forward by revising the traditional definition, incorporating location properties and rules into semantic location to model semantic location information. In order to be understood by computer system, semantic location is formalized by means of ontology technology. Then information processing flow in location service system is discussed. Finally, an example is given, building an ontology of campus domain location, and some experiment is carried out, realizing some simple adaptive location-based services.