A Navigation Assistance Agent: Mobile LBS Web Service

Searching the Location-Based Service (LBS) on the Internet, such as Yellow Pages, has the advantage to have the most updated information, for free (at least for the moment). Due to a number of limitations, mobile users still encounter many troubles when they use wireless device to perform online LBS searching. Providing a convenient access to the online LBS information for those wireless users is a challenging problem and also a business opportunity. In this paper, we focus on building intelligent agents to provide online LBS via wireless Internet accessing. Such an agent, based on address identification, can analyze the content of certain Web pages (ex. Yellow Pages) to search desired LBS information. We propose an ontology-based conceptual information retrieval approach combined with tree structure matching and the nearest neighbor methods to perform this task. A prototype, RouteInfo Mobile LBS for automobile drivers, has been developed to perform LBS searching, mapping and route finding.