Generally, there are many actors involved in the operation of an LBS. In the following text, an actor denotes an individual, organization, department, or enterprise that offers services to other actors, or consumes services from other actors, or does both of them. From a system’s point, each actor autonomously operates and controls its own administrative technical domain, given, for example, by a network infrastructure, a server farm, or only a single mobile device. It is common practice in the telecommunications or Internet sector to classify the different actors participating in the operation of a service according to their roles, where a role represents a certain field of activity of an actor associated with a set of functions for realizing and controlling portions of a service as well as making it accessible to the end user. For this purpose, the roles have to interact with each other. A reference point covers the interaction between a pair of roles and is basically an abstract term representing communication links, interfaces, protocols, and transactions that are needed to exchange any kind of user and control data a service or portions of a service are based on. The classical roles in mobile communications are the roles of subscriber, network operator, application service provider, and content provider. A single actor may adopt several of these roles, for example, the roles of network operator and application service provider often coincide, because companies operating a cellular network do not want to restrict to connectivity services only, but want to offer application services, too. At the same time, there is a need to separate these roles in order to enable open, highly competitive service markets, where multiple actors participate in a supply chain for composing and offering sophisticated IT services.

In the particular case of LBSs, this supply chain comprises positioning, the refinement of position fixes to location data, relating location data either with geographic content or location data of other targets, and translating the result to application data suitable for presentation to the LBS user. This chapter deals with the interorganizational aspects of LBS supply chains. At first, it presents a general overview of the various actors participating in the realization of an LBS and of a number of scenarios covering different constellations of their interaction. The remainder of the chapter then deals with patterns for the dissemination of location information and with privacy aspects.

Contents

• LBS Supply Chain
• Scenarios of the LBS Supply Chain
• Supplier/Consumer Patterns for Location Dissemination
  • Querying
  • Reporting
  • Evaluation of Querying and Reporting
• Privacy Protection
  • Characteristics of Privacy Protection for LBSs
  • Definition of Privacy
  • Concepts and Mechanisms for Privacy Protection
• Conclusion