The Location Based Services

Published Date: 02 Nov 2017

Finding a Useful Edge

Location based Services (LBS) usage was rising in our communities. In Bahrain, it seemed the technology was underutilized by organizations and institutions. They missed opportunities to achieve possible efficiencies and strategies. The research paper aimed to explore uses of location based services and how they could be implemented in organizations in Bahrain. In order to do this, a qualitative study would be done. The research team would understand the background of this technology. Furthermore, the perceptions of users would be understood. Understanding the perception helped in knowing proper implementation, because the users were not only the normal end users; they were the managers, CEO’S of the organization and companies who could create the change and enable these services. In order to facilitate further understanding of implementation, advantages and disadvantages of the technology will be examined. Knowing this information would let not only help implementation but also understand benefits gained from the technology. To complement the former, uses of mobile applications could offer to the organization were seen. To get the results of our study, we would analyze the current location based services and data mine a survey conducted on end users and top management; the data mining was to be made with Weka. We would analyze the uses according to effectiveness, efficiency, privacy, and conflict with organization goals and strategies. The results were evaluated uses and decision trees of the users’ acceptance. At the end, an explanation of the users’ acceptance would be provided along with an explanation of how uses could apply. Recommendations followed with ways of improving acceptance and good ways to implement uses. It would be appealing as much as possible so these location based services could be hopefully adopted by organizations in the future.

Table of Contents

Table of Figures

Chapter 1: Introduction

Research Problem:

Location-based services (LBS) could be used for a variety of uses. In Bahrain, there were opportunities for organization to use such services and gain some organizational advantage. Organizations either underutilized them or ignored them wasting their potential. The organizations did not achieve possible efficiencies and strategies. There was also trouble in the use with end users with Bahraini services. Organizations refer to both companies and governments. The team aimed to explore uses of location-based services and how could they be applied to Bahraini organizations and end users.

Research Significance:

The paper would introduce unexplored ways to implement location services in Bahrain and how the proposed location services could be integrated into the organization main process; this in turn would help organizations and the government to gain some forms strategic advantages. In addition, we would investigate what would push end users to use LBS if they weren’t using it.

Objectives:

Understand the current LBS market in Bahrain

Help improve LBS acceptability in Bahrain

Find ways to implement these services in Bahrain

Outline:

Ch1: introduction

This chapter discussed the project the problem statement, Research Significance, and objectives of the project.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

This chapter provided an overview about location based services, Mobile (With Respect to LBS), and the advantages and disadvantages of LBS.

Chapter 3: Methodology

This chapter would discuss the methods that would be used to analyze LBS uses and users’ perception of LBS.

Chapter 4: Data Analysis and Results

This chapter would contain our analysis and the corresponding results for both the survey and the uses of the LBS.

Chapter 5: Conclusion

This chapter concluded the project with a discussion of the uses result, the survey result, brief summary of what have been researched, and the team’s opinion in the matter.

Chapter 2: Literature Review

Introduction:

Companies moved from manual systems to computer systems and then to network systems. While we moved, we gain advantage and the organization functions became more efficient and effective. Technology allowed many core functions to be transformed from manual to automatic. Today with the rising use of mobile phones, they facilitate many technologies a product of these technologies is location based services. (Shin, et al., 2011) The uses of such services can reach many businesses and governments. (Chan, 2003) Location based services are used around the world. (Cellflare, 2009) Mobile complementary services make such LBS more effective. Countries utilize these services to gain advantage. (Truong, et al., 2010) This paper will attempt to investigate the uses of location based services and how they can be applied in Bahrain.

Background:

Location Based Services:

Location based services "is an innovative technology that provides information or making information available based on the geographical location of the user. Another definition was defined by Xu, et al. (2009) with the definition being "commercial location sensitive applications and services that utilize geographical positioning information to provide value-added services." The team decided use the Xu, et al. definition, as location based services follow the logic of being services. The service needs to find the location to function. (Chan, 2003) They use mobile devices that have ability to find their own location. (Solanas, et al., 2008) These services help users "relate and organize their worlds." (Abulleif & Al-Dossary, n.d.) They have been proven to be capable of important services towards mobile users as well. (Chow, et al., 2011) Location based services have aim to "deliver point of need information", and a result of that nature, the services become personalized. (Shin, et al., 2011) The services possible are not restricted to the former; there are capabilities for new services as well. (Mokbel & Levandoski, 2009) Not only are they useful to mobile users, but governments and business organizations too. (Umar, 2004)

Mobile (With Respect to LBS)

Sheck (2010) stated "a Location-Based Service (LBS) is a mobile computing application that provides information and functionality to users based on their geographical location." It was further stated that "first-generation examples include ‘show me nearby restaurant’-type applications. Next-generation LBS can provide additional benefits for users and service providers." (Shek, 2010)

According to Steiniger, "the user position can be obtained either by using the mobile communication network or by using the Global Positioning System (GPS). There are other ways as well. (Steiniger, et al., 2006)

There are many mobile application based on LBSs (Steiniger, et al., 2006). The table below divides LBSs mobile applications into 9 parts with some example.D:\University\2012\last semester\ITBIS 465\ITBIS465 Project\Mobile related\application type table.JPG

Figure : LBS Application Category (Steiniger, et al., 2006)

Location Based Services Uses:

The use of location based services applications is growing rapidly and it’s deploys around the world very fast. Nowadays, there are many fields or organizations use this technology to enhance and improve their performance. (Shek, 2010) There are lots of situations and cases the location based services can be implemented there to take the advantage of this technology. Currently, there are two main developments: emergency service and commercial applications. (Chan, 2003)

Emergency Services:

LBS can further assist emergency issues in many ways. Imagine a sailing accidents takes place; LBS to do the followings:

After receiving the emergency call and getting know of the location, the emergency control center can immediately ask the Coastguard/emergency helicopters which are nearest to the emergency location for help. (Chan, 2003)

Helicopter or coast guard boats can find and reach the location in shortest time by letting LBS find the fastest route between its location and the accident location. (Chan, 2003)

Commercial Application (m-commerce)

Nowadays, mobile applications grow rapidly saving the time and effort of many, but many users don’t know how take advantage of the benefits. One of the best ways to gain the benefits is to enable them to be location based. (Chan, 2003) To show such benefit, the following are some examples of m-commerce:

Rude Guide

By using mobile application that support LBS, it is act as a guide; it determine the currently fastest route between two positions, may identify traffic jams, and also it’s retrieve and display the nearest area point-of-interest or located in the surrounding area such as hospitals, museums, cinema, and restaurant etc. (Chan, 2003)

Push/Pull Advertising

"Pull" refers to location services that utilize the geographic of a wireless device to derive information related to the location enable user to pull information to them wherever and whenever it is needed. These techniques largely reduce the time spent in searching for desired items, at the same time help the vendors to build strong connections with customers. (Chan, 2003)

"Push" refers to location services that utilize the position of the wireless device to qualify the holder as a potential customer or recipient of a service. For example, by knowing locations of users, sellers can deliver advertisements to their nearby target customers. (Chan, 2003)

Location Sensitive billing

Through location based billing, the user can establish personal zones such as a home zone or work zone. Through arrangements with the serving wireless carrier, the user could perhaps enjoy flat-rate calling while in the home area and special rates while in other defined zones. This type of application can be especially useful when use in conjunction with other mobile applications such as prepaid wireless. (Chan, 2003)

Advantages and Disadvantages of Location Based Services:

Advantages:

Location based services enable the organization to make their functions and operation more effective and efficient and make the lives of people easier. Both the organizations and people benefit from the implementation of the location based service. (Brand Communications, n.d.)

According to Brand Communications, there are several benefits gained from the location based services:

Enhanced Customer Service

Enhanced Productivity

Cost Reductions

Advanced Management Reporting

Eliminate Redundant Processes

Security and Protection / Lone Worker Operations

Disadvantages:

Location-based services offer many advantages to consumers, but outdated privacy laws and inadequate privacy policies mean that organization or people will not be able to trust that their sensitive location information will remain private. LBS enable the collection of increasingly detailed information about consumers’ physical locations and other aspects of their personal lives, privacy laws are mired in the past and fail to provide the necessary legal protections for this sensitive information. (Ozer, et al., 2010)

Chapter 3: Methodology and Data Collection

Introduction

The paper would use two methods to understand factors in Bahrain regarding implementation. One method would be used to understand the services themselves. While the other one would explore potential users point of view regarding location based services. The first method would qualitative analysis of uses of location based services. They would be based on factors. As for the second method, it would be a survey with goal of understanding the user perception of location based services and their intention to use it. This survey would target end users and organizations. These two methods would help the team understand issues with implementing based services in Bahrain.

Methods

Qualitative Analysis of Uses

This qualitative would look at some uses and evaluate them based on some factor. In the beginning, each factor would be analyzed separately. After that, a conclusion based on the result of each factor would be given. The latter factors would help understand the service and give an idea if implementation was possible and how would they be implemented. The factors were as the following:

Effectiveness: How able the use was to improve goal accomplishment of a certain task.

Efficiency: Did the service help the service to be faster or smoother?

Privacy: To what extent did the use violate the privacy of the user?

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: Did the service have the potential to contradict with any goal or strategy of an organization?

Survey

The aim of this questionnaire was to explore the knowledge of the end-user and organizations top management about location based services (LBS) and measuring their acceptance. The questionnaire method used three question sets: a general question set, an end-user question set, and a top management question set. Both questionnaires would have sections that contain the same set of general questions about LBS; the other section of the questionnaires would contain specific questions. For the top management question set, it would contain questions measuring what LBS was perceived to offer to help the organization strategically, and for the end-user question set, it would see what kind of interaction and experience he/she have had with LBS. The targets of this survey were to be Bahraini only. The results would be analyzed with data mining to determine the relationships relating to LBS and the two users measuring their acceptance; the software doing the analysis would be Weka.

WEKA was a tool for data analysis and included implementations of data pre-processing, classification, regression, clustering, association rules, and visualization by different algorithms. (Zhao & Zhang, 2008)

Chapter 4: Data Analysis and Results

Uses Analysis

The team analyzed the following uses based on what they found:

Migration assistant

In some countries, they have used LBS to improve crossing border process. For example, a RFID system could be used to control crossing the border between countries. (Umar, 2004)

Factor:

Effectiveness: the process was completely done without disregard for any detail.

Efficiency: Using LBS to control crossing the border from country to country could reduce the average time it took from a range of 30 minutes to 2 hour to few seconds for regular travelers (low-risk traveler). (Umar, 2004)

Privacy: Using this technology, the government would be able to track the people who use this technology; there was room for snooping.

Conflict with organization strategy: The process should easily be integrated and aligned with organization strategy.

Overall Assessment: LBS would enable the government to make their process very efficient and effective, but it required a heavy investment. LBS would improve user satisfaction and took care of security awareness at the same time.

Employee Tracking

Some organizations implemented LBS to track their trucks during the shipment process. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: The supervisor will be able to track the delivery process and assure that the driver was taking the correct paths to the target without any unnecessary detours.

Efficiency: Using the LBS would enable the driver to find closest path and would reduce the delivery time. Also, it would improve user satisfaction.

Privacy: the driver location would be known and traceable by his supervisor wherever he/she goes at the working time; this could cause great discomfort and feelings of violation with the employees.

Conflict with organization strategy: The process had good integration and alignment potential with organization strategy where it would improve the process. If there was a goal where the organization respected privacy, the conflict was very possible.

Overall Assessment: LBS could improve the delivery and enforce the employee to deliver their product without off-route activities. LBS would increase the customer satisfaction. On the other side, some employee disliked being tracked by the others.

Route Planning

Based on the location of user, the user was sent to best destination. The best destination would be decided base on distance, traffic...Etc. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: the user would receive information that guides him/her to their next best destination. The application would aid in planning and scheduling. (Umar, 2004)

Efficiency: the service was highly efficient because what it required a navigation app to get information to make the decision.

Privacy: Since only the user location and his destination were required, there is no real concern about the user privacy. However, this could be subject to security threats.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: it was not expected of this service to cause conflict.

Overall Assessment: this service would help in reducing the time needed to complete scheduled visits to certain destinations. This would allow the user reach to more destinations with the new found efficiency thus increasing the productivity.

Emergency

When an emergency situation occurs, the location of where it occurred sent to the concerned authorities, police, firefighters, hospitals.

Effectiveness: The service would help the authorities reducing the damages of the emergency and contain the situation.

Efficiency: This service would help the authorities reach the location of the emergency much faster.

Privacy: The user privacy here would not be a major concern of the user rather than safety.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: there was no conflict with the organizational goals.

Overall Assessment: In regular cases the emergency was reported by a phone call and the person who reported the emergency sometime did not know what was his/her location or provide wrong information about the location. Since the location was sent by a GPS, the authorities would be sure that the correct location and arrive faster to handle the emergency.

Advertising

Messages or emails were sent to the users to notify them about offers, promotions, events, and warnings to raise the awareness toward them. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: the users would receive the massages personally and that would get their attention.

Efficiency: any update that occurs about these events, promotions…etc would be received easier by the users rather than to print whole new advertisement in a newspaper or magazine that the users may or may not see.

Privacy: to get the messages or emails to user, their phone numbers, and emails account were required. This would violate the user’s privacy if the data was abused.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: there was no conflicted with organizational goals and strategies.

Overall Assessment: Using this method was a great way to reach the uses personally, but the issue about the privacy can push the users away.

City Guide

The user was shown information relative to his or her location. This could be for tour purposes or just information about the functions of a government building. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: The user could get information that could aid him to know what he wants to know or helping him if he went to the right place for his purpose of visit.

Efficiency: The use was very efficient since the process of getting information was streamlined for the user with relatively low cost.

Privacy: This use had high capacity to violate the privacy of a user, as he or she was tracked around identically to being followed.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: This use had the capacity to break goals or strategies only if the organization in question had a friendly interaction with customer policy; friendly employees could not be replaced.

Overall Assessment: This use could be easily used by informational and tour organizations. It could offer a cost efficient service that pleases the customer.

Permit Assistant

The program would aid the user to get a permit for task relating to a site in mind. The program would see the area of the user and check if it was suitable. It would consider factors like the existence of critical underground wires. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: The application was usable for locations with straight forward issues. Complex inspection may prove challenging as it needed much data preloaded into the inspected. In other words, the areas would have to preinspected.

Efficiency: This could make the process of allowing permits much easier and faster because it could check rural areas that were difficult to manually inspect. (Umar, 2004)

Privacy: Privacy was not an issue because the user would send his location only when he or she sent the request.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: It was unlikely that this application would cause any conflict.

Overall Assessment:

Insurance Analysis

This application would do insurance analysis using the user's location. (Umar, 2004)

Effectiveness: Assuming the data for each location is included a database, the application should be able to give credible insurance analysis.

Efficiency: This application will speed up the process; there would be no need for a middle agent to get information on the area. If there be still a need for an agent to act, he or she would need less information. The agent would also travel less and focus on the more important tasks. All process would be efficient.

Privacy: Privacy was not an issue because the user would send his location only when he or she sent the request.

Possible Conflict with Organizational Goals and Strategies: It was unlikely that this application would cause any conflict.

Overall Assessment: Only if the data could be gathered efficiently or existed, then this application would be recommended to implement. The process of comprehensive analysis could be a costly one.

Survey Analysis

The survey was answered by 34 individuals. 18 recipients were end users, while the other 16 were organization management.

There were various decision tree algorithms to decide from. We chose Random Tree because it could generate results efficiently and the combination of large sets of random trees generally leads to accurate models. The organization decision tree was an exception since it used the J48 algorithm; it was an acceptable model.

After cleaning the data that gained form survey we use this tool and we came up with several models from the data. They were classified based on whom they concerned.

Both Users

trees1.png

Figure : Decision Tree for Both Users

Organization

C:\Users\Vamp\Dropbox\ITBIS465 Group Work\Project\final\Final Material\Anaysis and Results\organiztions.png

Figure : Organization only Decision Tree

Figure : User Only Decision TreeEnd usersC:\Users\Vamp\Dropbox\ITBIS465 Group Work\Project\final\Final Material\Anaysis and Results\Random (2).png

Chapter 5: Conclusion

Discussion

Survey Discussion

The results revealed the user’ acceptance of LBS; the conditions in which they acceptance was made clearer. When it came to the organization, we found two things applied. First, if managers or organizations think that LBS were useful and there were no problems to use them, then they either currently used it or they were planning to use LBS in the future. Secondly, if user or organizations think that LBS were not useful and there were several issues, such as privacy and security, then, they were not planning to use LBS in the future until they could assure then could overcomes with these problems. As for end users, it seemed as users would still use LBS even they were forced to use it for some purpose. In addition, if the end user did not mind sharing his location, he or she would only use LBS intentionally if there were no perceived problems; if the end user minded to share his location, he or she would likely use LBS. The results were close

Uses Discussion

Generally, LBS increased the effectiveness in any field it was implemented. They only threatened privacy if they the task required tracking. This could bring security threats. In addition, all uses increased efficiency of the task being done; they could reduce average time and potentially reduce cost. The uses would only with goals and strategies if the they specified labor as method of doing the task at hand. The last thing to be mentioned was the possibility of using LBS versus complexity of the task. A task could only be automated if the complexity of the task could be accommodated by an organization; the complexity had to be automated properly. Overall, the uses were very possible.

Recommendations

Improving Acceptance

Acceptance of LBS seemed to be related with privacy issues for both parties and cost for organizations only. Privacy could be dealt with two ways. First, potential users of LBS could be educated, through marketing or courses, on how these services help them. Secondly, laws that protect users against the privacy violations could be implemented; if these laws were upheld by the authorities, then users would grow to trust LBS and use them. As for dealing with the cost of LBS, a cost-benefit analysis must be made before implementing a service. The cost would include analysis and hardware. Cost could be lower since the wide availability of smart phones. If it was feasible, a commitment must be made to support the service to assure quality; this would for very important for complex applications. The former must be done to improve acceptability.

Implementing Uses

For best implementation result, three had to be done. First, the formerly mentioned cost-benefits analysis must be done with commitment if feasible. Secondly, an organization must implement LBS in areas in the organization where the benefits were the most. Alternatively, they could be implanted in areas of the core functions. This would be dependent on the context of the organization. This would encourage spreading LBS usage across the organization if successful. Thirdly, if the organization prefers labor to LBS when doing the task, LBS should be implemented to support staff instead; this would be done if the benefits exceed the cost. The recommendation should give a better idea of implementation.

Conclusion

The paper aimed to understand the Bahraini LBS market in order to improve its acceptability and help implement them in Bahrain. The Bahraini market suffered from negligence toward the LBS service. Most organization had not implemented them or underutilized them; this was due to fact of the unawareness of the potential uses of the LBS. An analysis was performed to see how the current LBS implementations were and how the user viewed them. The results show that the users’ acceptance relied on whether they perceived problems or not. The uses of LBS are highly effective and efficient for the normal task but complex tasks will require the organization commitment. Based on the paper recommendations, an implementation to LBS could be planed and done to benefit the organization. Also, user acceptance of LBS would be improved, even if it was gradual. Although LBS did not have widespread implementations yet in the Bahraini market, LBS use would grow in the future.

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