Tiled Feeds: delivering open and mashable location-based services

Description

Users now interact with multiple location-based services (LBS) through a myriad set of location-aware devices and interfaces -- ranging from laptop browsers to mobile devices and GPS units. However, current LBS tend to be centralized silos with ad-hoc APIs, which requires one-to-one integrations by LBS-consuming applications, and limits potential for information sharing and reuse.

Tiled Feeds is a location-based service platform that allows for delivery of LBS service in a standardized and Web-friendly way. It provides open and uniform access to multiple LBS, and offers service management and data portability across any Web-capable device. Based on standard Web technologies such as Atom and AtomPub, Tiled Feeds allow for publication, consumption, query, and arbitrary mashups of location-based services and geospatial datasets.

We demonstrate the flexibility of our system using a reference implementation server and two clients. The server publishes a few tiled feeds based on existing public geospatial data sources. The clients offer access to tiled feed data sources: a Web-based client that provides a full-featured, read-write interface to the platform, and a mobile client that provides read-only access to stored LBS subscriptions and views. This platform enables applications to consume and mashup location-based services without costly ad-hoc integrations.

Associated projects:

• Feed Queries — a protocol for understanding queryable dimensions of feeds and making actual queries on feed-based services
• Feed Subscription Management — a system for managing feed subscriptions across devices and services.

Screenshots

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Publications

• Yiming Liu, Rui Yang and Erik Wilde, Open and Decentralized Access across Location-Based Services, 20th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW2011), Hyderabad, India, March 2011.
• Yiming Liu and Erik Wilde, Personalized Location-Based Services, iConference 2011, Seattle, Washington, February 2011.
• Yiming Liu and Erik Wilde, Scalable and Mashable Location-Oriented Web Services, 10th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2010), Vienna, Austria, July 2010.

Demos

• Tiled Feed Instant Map Mashup Creator — This web client is a visualization tool. Use it to:
  • explore the geospatial datasets we have published tiled feeds
  • create instant mashup views
  • explore feed queries and query-based views
  Just click to select the services/feeds you want to consume, tune each of them to your liking using the generated query form on the left, and view the map visualization on the right. Multiple location-based services/datasets, one uniform way to interact with them all.
• Sample feed query schema — for the U.S. historical earthquakes feed
• Sample tiled feed output — tile 02301021, covering northern California
• Feed Subscription Management profile — the set of initial spatial feeds being loaded by demo Instant Mashup Creator