An example of a touristic Location Based Service (LBS) with Open Source software

Location Based Services (LBS) provide information and data to the user based on geographical position. These services are usually based on a communications network and one or more positioning technologies, combined with geographical information systems (GIS) which collect the information and present it to the end user. An LBS service is implemented within an infrastructure which must contain at least these five elements: a mobile device (e.g. a cell phone or PDA), a communications network (GSM, GPRS, UMTS), a positioning component (GPS receiver), a service provider and lastly a data provider. On an international level, both the ISO Technical Committee 211 and the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) issued standards and specifications regarding the LBS services. This work concerns the development of a client-server framework compliant with the OpenLS OGC standard and built entirely with Free and/or Open Source software. The LBS service is a tourist information application for the city of Cagliari in Sardinia (Italy).