TransportML: A Middleware for Location-Based Services Collaboration

Location-Based Services (LBS) are information and entertainment services, accessible with mobile devices and making use of the position of the mobile device. Although LBS are now widely used, better results could be obtained by merging information issued by several services. Inter-LBS collaboration is still uncommon although a lot of work is done on service orchestration languages such as WS-BPEL 2.0. One of the obstacles is that LBS are created and updated on the fly. This dynamism makes manual composition scenario update difficult. To tackle this problem, we introduce TransportML, a middleware for inter-LBS collaboration, in an automatic fashion. TransportML relies on technologies such as Web services and semantic Web. In this platform, services are discovered and collaboration scenarios are elaborated on the fly. As a consequence, the platform is auto-adaptive and composition scenario maintenance is no longer required.