Role of Mobile OS and LBS Platform in Design of E-Tourism Smart Services
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UBICOMM 2016 : The Tenth International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies Role of Mobile OS and LBS Platform in Design of e-Tourism Smart Services Ekaterina Balandina1, Sergey Balandin2,3, Yevgeni Koucheryavy1, Mark Zaslavskiy2,3 1 Tampere University of Technology, 2 ITMO University, 3 FRUCT Ltd Tampere, Finland; Saint-Petersburg, Russia; Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected]; [email protected] Abstract – The paper discusses opportunities and challenges efficiently search, filter and process the data and so become in development of the current ecosystem of digital services. more intelligent and proactive. Special attention is paid to analysis of the role of Location Based Therefore, the motivation for this study is to take part in Services (LBS) platforms for service ecosystems in the Internet of the definition of design for the new generation of mobile Things (IoT) era. We study architectures of LBS-enabled smart services ecosystem [1], which, in particular, fulfils the systems and analyze factors that could enable faster adoption of new service paradigms by the industry. The paper discusses following criteria: potential roles of the IoT infrastructure for addressing this - provides innovative pro-active smart services that problem. One of the supporting questions is the role of mobile improve quality of life, are highly personalized, taking operational systems in development of a future ecosystem of the over the most difficult and boring work from the user, services, which we study by reviewing two approaches helping to save natural resources and wherever possible implemented in two open source mobile operational systems: allow to use prophylaxis instead of curing a damage Sailfish OS and Tizen OS. One of the starting observations was created by a problem; that the “cold start” problem is one of the top factors that block - is stable, efficient and scalable to enable broad services from successful development. The problem refers to the deployment of Internet of Things paradigm that will case when a new service lacks relevant content. We propose to address this problem by providing developers with a toolkit for connect by two orders of magnitude more devices than accessing relevant content available in various open databases. the number of humans on the planet. Development of a method for efficient data importing from open The development of such ecosystem for smart services databases and content management is one of the practical results demands to find solutions for the following two domains: of this study. We implemented the proposed method as an - mobile operational system (OS) that is functionally rich, extension to the open source LBS platform Geo2Tag. Now, it is flexible and efficient to provide required low-level available for free use and illustrates really good performance. support for the smart services; Results of our study were tested on the most typical use cases of - availability of a tool to define the accurate context of the services for tourists and hospitality industry. The practical user and collect the corresponding contextual information. results of projects are available for use by business and helped us formulate priorities for further research. In complex ecosystems, such as smart spaces, mobile devices are considered primary as a tool for accessing services Keywords: LBS; Internet of Things; Geo2Tag; Sailfish OS; [2]. However, development of the smart services ecosystem import of open data. demands more active role of mobile devices, i.e., they shall become center of the personal smart space and the personal management hub for the surrounding IoT devices [3]. I. INTRODUCTION Consequently the mobile devices shall become more powerful and the mobile OS be more efficient, functional-reach and Nowadays, the service market is in the middle of a major flexible to provide the required support. In the next section of transformation towards smart and proactive services. This this paper we provide the corresponding analysis and transformation is supported by higher availability of powerful comparison of the available mobile OS ecosystems. mobile devices with broadband network access, large memory Also, in the last years, we have seen that the role of and significant processing power, which allow to store and location-aware services is increasing and the corresponding efficiently process large volume of data. Moreover, the ecosystem is growing fast and developing in all aspects. Most development of the Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystem of mass-market mobile devices have embedded technologies enables modern services to collect most relevant local content for detecting location. This creates a huge opportunity to and manage the environment around the user. But, despite the develop services and solutions that associate virtual tags to the fact that the opportunity is there, in practice, we still see only a real physical objects and processing most relevant content few examples of services that take this opportunity to practice. based on the geographical context. This domain is called So, let us analyze potential reasons for the slow adoption of Location Based Services (LBS) and it very natural approach new technologies and present our solutions that are targeted to for development of smart services of next generation, which improve the situation. can be used for various use cases, e.g., for the cultural heritage The absolute majority of available services are based on management systems [1][4]. the interaction of a user with mobile devices. The user does The third section of the paper discusses the potential role not only consume deliverables, but is actively involved in of LBS platform for development of smart services. As a content creating, knowledge management and decision result of IoT ecosystem development, we expect significant making. However, we evaluate that this approach has reached rise of the demand for LBS support, as IoT solutions need to its limits due to the explosive growth of volume and monitor the geographical position of the things in time and complexity of data. The services shall autonomously and attach them with a set of relevant attributes. This is exactly Copyright (c) IARIA, 2016. ISBN: 978-1-61208-505-0 172 UBICOMM 2016 : The Tenth International Conference on Mobile Ubiquitous Computing, Systems, Services and Technologies what LBS platforms provide from the box. For this study we for proper management of the personalized smart spaces by particularly discuss how the LBS platform can address the SIB even on most powerful Android phones. Moreover, “cold-start” problem. It is well known problem for newly Android architecture is not good for implementation of the launched services that do not have critical mass of relevant proper privacy solution. As a result Android OS was excluded content. Lack of relevant content makes services less from further consideration. attractive for the users and often lead to the complete fail of a But, further study of this topic discovered that, nowadays, project. there are two open source mobile OS that could fulfill our For this study, we took as an example the IoT-enabled requirements. The first candidate is Tizen OS that is the best open source LBS platform Geo2Tag [5]. The platform already of available mobile OS adopted for use in resource restricted provides most of required service primitives, so importing devices and IoT environment. For the last two years, Tizen OS function could be delivered with reasonable efforts. The is clearly positioned to take the dominant role as operational additional advantage of the platform is that it provides system for Internet of Things [9]. Nowadays, one can find a efficient toolkit for development of services based on the lot of IoT devices on Tizen and the system ensures seamless Smart Spaces principles. device-to-device connectivity and address needs of the whole As a source of content, we are offering the universal Internet of Things environment. Tizen OS is target to remove importer from largest databases of open data. Open data is fast border between the personal mobile device and surrounding growing model of content delivery, where content is generated IoT devices, as all devices operate under the same OS and by volunteers and in projects funded by government and mobile device can be seen just as one of IoT devices. Such flat public funding, which makes the generated content available peer-to-peer architecture is very scalable and well fits to the for free use. Already now thus model is strong competitor to general IoT scenarios. However, it is not optimal for the classical schemes of paid access to the content and it is deployment of smart spaces that are done on principles of expected that its role will increase in the future [6]. So the client-server architecture. As a consequence Tizen third section provides general presentation of our solution and smartphones are not so much optimized for heavy discusses benefits that it delivers to the services. The fourth computations and the privacy model does not directly match section presents implementation of the corresponding solution to the smart spaces needs. Moreover, nowadays there are not and discusses its performance characteristics. The key findings many Tizen-enabled smartphones and none of them is and results of our study are summarized in the conclusion powerful enough to run SIB of the personal smart space. So as section, followed by acknowledgments and list of references. a conclusion we admit that Tizen OS is very promising mobile OS with great potential for our needs, but at the moment it is not suitable and there are no Tizen smartphones that can be II. ROLE OF MOBILE OS used even for prototyping purposes. We are going to keep eye The root of this study is based on observation that the on further development of Tizen OS ecosystem, but had to mobile device shall not be any longer seen as a pure service drop it for the purpose of this study.