A Navigation Assistance Agent: Online Access to LBS

LBS (location-based service) is an important component of navigation assistance systems. Modern onboard devices employ CD-based or DVD-based data storage. In this paper, we are interested in techniques that can be used to build agents for searching and accessing online LBS information. Such agents must be capable of content-based analysis, as most LBS information provided by text in a Web page cannot be easily classified and identified by a keyword search engine. We propose an ontology-based conceptual information retrieval method to perform real-time online LBS information access. The proposed method allows the automatic identification of addresses as structural knowledge through graph matching. Location-based information can then be retrieved and extracted on the basis of addresses: the abundant location-based services provided by YellowPages are an example. A prototype, RouteInfo, has been developed to integrate positioning, LBS information search, address geo-coding and route finding.