Location-Based Services: A Taxonomy on Theory and Practice

The provisioning of Location-Based Services (LBS) follows the chain of determination of a position, mapping this information onto a natural language-based description of this position and performing the service itself. The evolution of technologies regarding applications and infrastructure, standards and contents has brought up various streams that have influenced the development of this chain over the past years (Zeimpekis et al., 2003). On the one hand, emerging theoretical concepts have been showing the way for many commercial and non-commercial services. On the other hand, the conceptual evolution has been accompanied by significant investments of mobile technology companies and service providers to the further development of practical solutions (Gessler and Jesse, 2001).