User Profiles in Location-based Services: Make Humans More Nomadic and Personalised

Introduction The rapid expansion of WWW has unobtrusively influenced humans' socio-economical life patterns in the last decade. With the development of portable phones, PDAs and laptops, Humans cannot be satisfied anymore simply by rich and exact access to the information. They look today for the more dynamic and personalized services on the move. Thus, the ubiquitous computing approach [1] is becoming emergent and popular. As one of its significant components, especially due to its dynamical characteristics of the space, time and contexts, location-based services (LBS) [2][3][4] emphasize the ability to take into account the spatial, temporal and contextual characteristics of their interactions with the users to provide the most appropriate service based on the local environment. Their location-centric approach distinguishes them from the traditional research on web information retrieval and personal navigation [5][6]. A key point of improving LBS is how to tailor the contents and representation to individual's specific spatio-temporal context. In the literature, some research [6][7][8] has been using user profiles in information filtering. In this paper