Towards a semantic-aware location positioning for smart-phones

Location-aware services and applications have become quite popular in the daily life of mobile users. Global Positioning System (GPS) is available in almost all new smartphones as a mature and accurate positioning technique. GPS as a satellite-based navigation system, determines the current location of users by receiving signals from satellites. Satellite signals cannot propagate properly inside the buildings, which makes it unusable for indoor positioning. In addition, GPS consumes too much energy to be useful for many applications on mobile phones. There are many proposed alternatives for GPS but they are not as accurate. Combination of those alternatives can improve the accuracy, but varies widely depending on the user behavior and environment. This paper presents a novel architecture for semantic-aware positioning that chooses the best positioning method(s) by exploiting the semantic knowledge.