Mobile Intelligence

10.5 A WEB 2.0 SUPPLY CHAIN FOR LBS

Generally, there may be many actors involved in the operation of an LBS, and it is therefore useful to describe their interactions in a supply chain. An actor denotes an individual, organization, department, or enterprise that offers services to other actors, or consumes services from other actors, or does both of that. Actors are classified according to roles, where a role represents a certain field of activity of an actor associated with a set of functions for realizing and controlling portions of a service as well as making it accessible to the end user. Figure 10.4 shows a general model for an LBS supply chain, which follows the Web 2.0 approach and which identifies the participating roles and their relationships.

The supply chain follows the approach of user-centricity and mashups as proclaimed by Web 2.0, that is, content from several sources is combined at the user's device to built a new service. Location data of targets are considered to be another kind of content besides images, videos, or text. The supply chain contains the following roles:

• Target. As already mentioned in the previous section, a target is a mobile individual or object that is to be located, tracked, or sighted. For this purpose, it is equipped with a mobile device, which besides communication facilities, can perform positioning.

  

  Figure 10.4 Generic LBS supply chain. ...