Cartographic Integration on Mobile Devices from Several Providers’ Lbs by Means of Map Symbol Ontology

With the increasing number of geographical data and distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise while integrating the details of user‘s response from many service providers into a unified visual portal on mobile device (i.e. Street View map).Through a conventional point of view, the use of many Location Based Services (LBS) providers will imply several maps, one for each; whereas a cartographic integration will generate a unique map whose components will come from those various LBS providers. For this purpose, spatial domain ontology-driven approach of map symbols will be presented and some selection rules will be given especially based on user’s preferences and graphical semiology. To avoid duplicate outputs of homologous objects, issued from many providers, different issues of data/metadata integrations will be studied by using (1) geometric reasoning (based on Euclidian distance), (2) semantic reasoning (based on a feature ontology), (3) place name reasoning (based on a gazetteer or Levenshtein distance), within the framework of belief theory and (4) symbol integration (through the map symbol ontology). This article will present the fusion techniques and the development of a platform named MPLoM (MultiProviders LBS on Mobile) which is able to support its mobile navigators with personalized preferences and location based services either in push or pull mode. We conclude this paper by advocating the creation of new web services based on multiple providers. * Corresponding author. This is useful to know for communication with the appropriate person in cases with more than one author.