Location services enable customized information to be delivered or made available based on the specific location of the user. Knowing where the user is at any given time adds a valuable dimension to the kinds of services that can be offered.

As Harry Niedzwiadek writes in his feature article, "All businesses are in pursuit of just-in-time actionable information - just the right information, at the right time, at the right location, on any device - from which they can make effective decisions and take immediate action." This observation applies equally to individuals in our daily lives. At some points in our lives, we have all found a need to know, for example, where the closest Pizza Palace is and how to get to it from wherever we happen to be at the moment, with a car full of hungry kids! Also check out What are Location Services? - From a GIS Perspective, by Ian Koeppel, ESRI Location Services Industry Manager.

Within the mobile wireless network community, there are two distinct aspects of Location Services:

• Location Services (also called Mobile Positioning or Mobile Position Determination technology) deliver specific information about the geographic location (i.e., position) of mobile terminals such as mobile telephones, PDAs, and other devices attached to other moveable items such as people, packages and vehicles.
• Location Application Services (also called Location-based Services) deliver end-user applications, normally based on knowing the position of a user with their mobile terminal. These services can be delivered through a wide range of devices, including wireless phones, in-vehicle tracking modules and other types of mobile terminals. Location Application Services also support operations throughout a location-enabled enterprise, including such applications as customer relationship management, accounting, network planning, inventory management, field service, network management, inside/outside plant, and so on.

From a user's perspective the distinction between Location Services and Location Application Services may not be important. For simplicity, we use the general term Location Services to describe the infrastructure and services that deliver location-based information to users and are available across fixed and mobile networks, such that they can be used by anyone, anywhere at any time and on any device. Location Services become integral to the enterprise (and to the way individuals behave) when they are ubiquitous, efficient and easy to use.

Why is location so useful?

Location is a foundational, unifying principle humans use to organize their "mental maps" of the world. Location has tremendous utility in the development of the "semantic Web" precisely because it is so central to how humans organize and relate to their physical and conceptual worlds.

How is location used?

Location most certainly takes us one step closer to modeling the reality of our business (not to mention organizing our personal life!).

How so? Let's assume that a business has valuable information that is now buried in files, folders, documents and tables scattered around the enterprise and they want to get at this information more easily. Now let's say that much of these information have some form of location content, be they messages, asset maps, documents, customer databases, delivery routes, transaction reports, or whatever. Now let's add a location application server to the warehouse. The location application server keys on the location properties of warehouse holdings and organizes and provides location-based access to these data, accordingly. Likewise, the location application server makes it easy to exploit business information holdings, keying on location properties to generate reports and maps with actionable business information.

Types of Information in Time and Space

The following types of information occur continuously or intermittently in time and space.

• Positions. Fixed locations. Expressed in terms of coordinates, positions on a map, named places, and so forth.
• Events. Time-dependent incidents (past, present, or future) at one or more locations.
• Distributions (e.g. demographics). The densities, frequencies, patterns, and trends of people, objects or events within a given area(s).
• Assets. Fixed and/or mobile assets. Asset management. Inventories. Condition/status.
• Service Points. Points of service delivery. May also pertain to prospects or targets of interest. Further characterized by levels of service and quality of service.
• Routes. Navigational information expressed in terms of coordinates, directions (angles), named streets and distances, landmarks, and/or other navigation aids. Navigational logs.
• Context/ Overview. Maps, charts, three-dimensional scenes (virtual reality) or other means for representing the context and relationships between people, objects and events over a given area(s).
• Directories. Catalogs. Listings. Directories.
• Transactions. Transactions for the exchange of goods, services, securities, etc. Trading services. Financial services.
• Sites. Characteristics of a given site (e.g. suitability).

Types of Location Services

Here we list examples of location services, in the form of user requirement statements (or questions), organized by information type (row) and market segment (column).