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Aittola M (2003)
Location-aware services in mobile devices.
M.Sc. thesis, Department of Electrical and Information Engineering, University of Oulu, Finland (in Finnish).

Location-aware services use the user’s location to provide him/her with added value. Such services are valuable especially to mobile users. Advances on positioning technologies and small terminal devices have made developing mobile location-aware services possible. It requires knowledge from many domains of technology to build a location-aware service. The key domains include positioning methods and the technologies of modelling, storing, delivering and visualizing location information. In this work, the concepts of location information and its use as part of the user’s context are studied. The research done on context-awareness is reviewed. Based on the review, the most important ways of using location in context-aware services are defined. This work also figures out what technologies one could choose as the building blocks of location-aware services, considering the limited resources of mobile environment. This work also presents SmartWare, a platform for mobile services. The author has contributed to the design and implementation of the platform and the location-aware mobile services, named SmartServices, built on it. The mapbased guidance service has been built wholly by the author. The technological challenges of location-awareness are solved in practice in the process of building the platform and the services. SmartWare platform and map-based guidance were tested in SmartLibrary, a mobile service built in the main library of the University of Oulu. The test users searched literature from the library using the map-based guidance, and compared the service to the traditional way of searching literature with shelf classification codes. The users also gave feedback of the laboriousness and usability of the searching methods. The results of the test show that finding material from the library is easier with the map-based guidance than in the traditional way. Especially novice library users preferred the map-based guidance. After testing, the guidance was taken into the selection of services of the library.

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