A Location-Based Service (LBS) is usually a service running on a mobile device that provides facts or recreational information. It employs geolocation to make the facts or entertainment more personal to the user of the application. An example of a typical LBS is one that identifies the location of a device and then discovers the location of restaurants in the immediate vicinity of that location. As LBS become more common, their commercial value will become more readily evident to corporations, who can use them to personalize users’ experiences with location-aware weather, coupons, and advertising. This is already becoming more common, and will only continue to grow in the future.
An LBS begins by gathering a location for the device using one of its available methods, which could be through GPS, the GSM/CDMA Cell ID, or its IP Address, for example. Once it has a location in latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates, it can then retrieve whatever additional information it is programmed to receive. This information is then presented to the user, most likely to be interacted with in some fashion.
Some popular examples of LBS are:
- Turn-by-turn navigation to an inputted address
- Notifications regarding traffic congestion or accidents
- Location of nearby businesses, restaurants, or other services
- Social interaction with other people nearby
- Safety applications for tracking members of a family
This list could go on and on, as there are countless things to be done with LBS today. LBS is a large part of geolocation today, but they are not the only services that use geolocation for their functionality.
Source: Holdener (2011). HTML5 Geolocation. O’Reilly Media, Inc.