Funded
by the Joint Information Systems Committee.
Investigator:
George Roussos.
In a matter of a few years, the Internet has emerged as a popular, everyday communications tool. Although this fact has primarily caused a wide range of commerce and entertainment services to be on offer, it has also opened up opportunities for the efficient and effective management of knowledge and for e-learning. The emergence of the mobile Internet holds even more promise. Mobile learning offers the opportunity for blended training that employs both face-to-face and remote methods, available whenever and wherever needed. Moreover, mobile learning can support a wide range of activities from on-the-job knowledge aids (for example, delivery of task specific knowledge context) to highly personalised collaboration tools. Indeed, knowledge availability and opportunities for learning are no longer tied to the desk or the classroom but are on demand and available anywhere, anytime. Although mobility opens up exciting new opportunities, it is also a limiting factor in that it restricts the usability and usefulness of the services provided over the mobile Internet: to best serve their purpose, mobile devices have to be small with a correspondingly small display. A further consequence of the small form factor is lower computational capability. For this reason it becomes essential that services offered on mobile devices require little or no navigation which further implies that the service itself should be adaptive to the needs of the particular person using the service as well as responsive to the situation that person is in. In fact, to be successful, mobile Internet services will have to be highly personalised and context aware. Location information is a core component of user context and at the same time provides opportunities for user location registration and tracking. This report will review location-sensing technologies for mobile and ubiquitous computing systems and their applications in m-learning environments.
The report will be organised in the
following way: First, we will discuss the properties of location sensing systems
to establish a basis on which to compare their capabilities. Particular emphasis
will be on the different types of location systems (physical versus symbolic
location information), the type of location information provided (absolute
versus relative positions), their accuracy, precision, scale and scope. Location
sensing technologies are most useful when coupled with spatial representations
to support registration and querying. A review of methods for uniform access
to location information will be included as well as models for the representation
of physical spaces that have proven effective for this task. Last but not
least, we will discuss the cost of deploying location-sensing technologies
from the point of view of the access device as well as from the point of view
of the required infrastructure.
Further, we will discuss the advantages
and disadvantages of existing indoor and outdoor location sensing systems,
including Active Bat, Motion Star, Cricket, Wi-Fi signal degradation, GSM/CDMA
in-cell, Bluetooth location beacons, Pinpoint, radio frequency identification
(RFID), Easy-Living, Smart Floor, Spot-on, Global Positioning System (GPS).
We will also discuss selected case studies of the use of location information
for the provision of mobile learning services including projects at University
of California at San Diego, at Stanford Learning Lab and at Helsinki University
of Technology.
The emergence of next generation
mobile systems --usually referred to as ubiquitous or pervasive computing
infrastructures-- will be heavily dependent on location information for a
variety of tasks. Ubiquitous computing refers to a pervasive "fabric"
of intelligent instruments, appliances, information sources and information
analysis tools all tied together by high-speed wired and wireless networks,
and may include personal software service "agents" that remove the
burden of constantly searching for, gathering, and analysing information in
a data rich environment. The final part of this report will discuss the future
of location based service provision in the context of ubiquitous computing.