A generic location-based mobile application framework supporting privacy-preserving end-user tailorability

Location is the fey factor in defining context information of today´s mobile applications and services. As a matter of fact, location is increasingly used to stimulate collaboration in various ways and location-aware applications experienced a wide-spread usage. However, existing mobile services, even those which are Web enabled, do not support end-user tailorability. For example, at the level of defining community-specific points of interest of any type on both user interface (UI) and server-side level. In this paper, we identify the need for supporting such end-user tailorability based on performed analysis of various use cases related to collaborative location-based scenarios in mobile settings. We present a generic framework for collaborative mobile applications and services that support privacy respecting location-based scenarios. We demonstrate this with the means of an iOS based prototype. Our prototype allows different communities to define their own points of interests in a generic manner (at-runtime) by simultaneously supporting group collaboration functionality (e.g., communication, awareness, etc.). The distributed architecture can also be tailored according to privacy needs.