Extensible platform for location based services provisioning

Location based services can be considered as the most rapidly expanding field of the mobile communications sector. The proliferation of the mobile/wireless internet, the constantly increasing use of handheld, mobile devices and position tracking technologies and the emergence of mobile computing, prepared the grounds for the introduction of this new type of services with impressively large application domain and use range. Prompted by the avalanche of technology advances in the aforementioned areas in this paper we present a generic platform for delivering location based services (LBS). The platform features a modular architecture, which can be easily extended with additional functionality. The paper focuses on the technical specifications, the design and the prototype implementation of the platform´s kernel, which is responsible for coordinating communication with various pluggable components in order to provide the full range of operations involved in the LBS delivery chain (i.e., from initial deployment to invocation, execution and delivery of results). Issues such as scalability, efficiency, openness, portability and security are also considered in the design of the platform.