Personalized location-based services

Location-Based Services (LBS) are based on a combination of the inherent location information about specific data, and/or the location information supplied by LBS clients, requesting location-specific and otherwise customized services. The integration of location-annotated data with existing personal and public information and services creates opportunities for insightful new views on the world, and allows rich, personalized, and contextualized user experiences. One of the biggest constraints of current LBS is that most of them are essentially vertical services . These current designs makes it hard for users to integrate LBS from a variety of service providers, either to create intermediate value-added services such as social information sharing facilities, or to facilitate client-side aggregations and mashups across specific LBS providers. Our approach, the Tiled Feeds architecture, applies the well-established, standard Web service pattern of feeds, and extends it with query and location-based features. Using this approach, LBS on the Web can be exposed in a generalized and aggregation-friendly way. We believe this approach can be used to facilitate the creation of standardized, Web-friendly, horizontally integrated location-based services.