ULP: A Location Platform That Can Handle Multiple Location Representations

Location based services attract a great deal of attention. Existing location based service, however, rely on the dedicated positioning devices and location representations although people use several kinds of location representations such as the room number, the shop name, and latitude/longitude. This paper proposes universal location platform (ULP), a location platform that can handle any kinds of positioning devices and multiple location representations. In addition, a user can define a new location representation. Since ULP employs REST and XML in its communication, applications can easily use ULP. ULP was implemented in PHP. Fundamental performance of our implementation is also shown.