Location based service provider

• US 20040023666A1
• Filed: 03/19/2003
• Published: 02/05/2004
• Est. Priority Date: 03/19/2002
• Status: Active Grant

• Current Assignee: Precisely Software Incorporated
• Original Assignee: Pitney Bowes Software Incorporated (Böwe Systec AG)
• Inventors: Berrrill, Arthur R., Li, Xiang, Moon, George Christopher, Dewald, Edward T., Petronis, Scott, Tweedie, Matthew W., Dove, John L.
• Granted Patent: US 7,386,318 B2
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 455/456.1
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 16/9537 Spatial or temporal dependent retrieval, e.g. spatiotemporal queries
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 63/083 using passwords cryptographic mechanisms or cryptographic arrangements for entity authentication using a predetermined code H04L9/3226
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/02 based on web technology, e.g. hypertext transfer protocol [HTTP]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/04 specially adapted for terminals or networks with limited capabilities; specially adapted for terminal portability
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/306 User profiles
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/51 Discovery or management thereof, e.g. service location protocol [SLP] or web services
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 67/52 specially adapted for the location of the user terminal
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 69/329 in the application layer [OSI layer 7]
• CPC Class Codes: H04L 9/40 Network security protocols
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/02 Services making use of location information
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 4/029 Location-based management or tracking services
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 40/00 Communication routing or communication path finding
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 64/00 Locating users or terminals or network equipment for network management purposes, e.g. mobility management
• CPC Class Codes: H04W 8/26 Network addressing or numbering for mobility support

Abstract

The disclosed method and system provide extensible or stand-alone location enabled services at granularity down to a stand-alone service. The various interfaces are preferably specified via DTD or schemas for communication based on XML. This collection of services enables management of mobile device locations information, and real-time services. Mobile device location is integrated with other location sensitive data, such as maps or demographics of a particular region or even the location of businesses and consumers to enable a richer service offering for customers of wireless carriers and service providers. Examples of such services include obtaining routes to a destination; providing a geocode corresponding to an address; providing an address corresponding to a geocode; providing maps as image files encompassing specified geocodes, locations, or addresses and the like. Additional services may be added to the disclosed system and method seamlessly due to the use of extensible interfaces.

Claims

1. An integrated system for providing geographical locations based services to clients, the system comprising:

a networked routing manager module for receiving a request or sending a response;

a plurality of response modules registered with the routing manager for handling one or more types of service requests, the service requests including obtaining one or more records containing a geocode corresponding to an address, an address corresponding to a geocode;

a route to a destination, a position for a mobile device, identity of a location, one or more geographic features near a location; and

a person profile data;

a plurality of spatial servers in communication with one or more of the response modules from the plurality of response modules to provide spatial information;

an interface for adding response modules, the interface registering an added response module to the plurality of response modules registered with the routing manager; and

wherein the routing manager forwards the request to at least one registered response module, which, in turn, receives spatial information from at least one spatial server, and sends a result to the routing manager for generation of the response to the request.

2. The system of claim 1, further comprising response modules for mapping, coordinate geometry service for carrying out geometric calculations and measurements, coordinate transformations, providing traffic related information, generating enterprise specific maps;

and providing an enterprise profile.

3. The system of claim 1, wherein at least one of the request and the response is encoded in a markup language.

4. The system of claim 1 further comprising one or more third party servers in communication with one or more of the response modules from the plurality of response modules, wherein the one or more response modules receive requested third party information.

5. The system of claim 1, wherein each of the plurality of response modules has a unique name for registering a service with the routing manager.

6. The system of claim 5, wherein each of the response modules presents at least one interface for interacting with the routing manager whereby the routing manager initializes or closes a selected response module, parses and publishes a request document, and handles results of a received request.

7. The system of claim 1, wherein the request received by the routing manager from a first network address results in the response being directed to a second network address.

8. The system of claim 1, wherein the response containing nearest geographic features includes an instruction or a link for accessing a network address corresponding to at least one geographic feature.

9. The system of claim 8, wherein the at least one geographic feature is an address of a location-based-information-system server associated with a user location, and the location-based-information-system server also provides personalization data as part of the person profile service.

10. The system of claim 9, wherein the location-based-information-system server also provides links to one or more local servers, associated with the user location, corresponding to input profile data or a user profile.

11. The system of claim 9, wherein the location-based-information-system server redirects a user to a first local server, or provides a choice of local servers.

12. The system of claim 11, wherein the first local server has additional user profile information.

13. The system of claim 11, wherein the first local server provides information about one or more of sales, promotions, availability of a product or service, alternative sellers of a specified product close to the user location, or alternative providers of a specified service close to the user location.

14. The system of claim 9 further comprising a user interface responsive to one or more taps or strokes on a pad, one or more clicks of an input device, or a voice command.

15. A user interface, in the system of claim 13, for navigating through a plurality of location based services to accumulate data for a task requiring results from two or more services.

16. The user interface of claim 15 further comprising navigation through sales, promotions, products, services, or events associated with a user profile or preference, the navigation being via one or more of choosing a location from a sorted list, selecting one or more entries corresponding to products or services, and requesting/receiving directions to a selected location.

17. The user interface of claim 16 further comprising functionality for navigation backwards to visit a previously presented screen.

18. The user interface of claim 16, wherein one or more of the sales, promotions, products, services, or events are presented to the user as a sorted list.

19. The user interface of claim 18, wherein the sorted list is based on one or more of attribute values matching with the user profile or preference.

20. The user interface of claim 18, wherein each event is associated with values of a plurality of event attributes, and each user profile comprises values of a plurality of profile attributes, wherein one or more of the event and profile attributes are weighted to reflect their relative significance followed by the generation of a similarity score based on shared attributes and their respective weights.

21. The user interface of claim 20, wherein the profile attributes are standardized, based on their distribution in a reference database.

22. A message encoded in a markup language comprising a location of interest, a plurality of nested tags, the message comprising an outer tag indicating a first service, wherein the first service may include specifications for additional services;

and at least one inner tag with a plurality of attributes, wherein at a user interface one or more fields corresponding to the plurality of attributes are presented to receive data for providing the first service or the result of a service request.

23. The message of claim 22, wherein the location of interest is represented by one or more of user input, a base station location signal, an address, a geocode, two or more base station signals detected by a mobile phone, and two or more GPS signals.

24. The message of claim 22, wherein the user interface includes an indication for sending the message to a server.

25. The message of claim 24 comprising at least one tag in response to which the server forwards at least a part of the message to a service server.

26. The message of claim 24, wherein a response message is sent by the server, the response message encoded in a markup language using nested tags with attributes identifying data corresponding to one or more of alternative routes to a specified destination, a list of local servers for obtaining local information, an ordered list of events, a list of products or services, a location, a map, a list of nearest geographical features, or transformed coordinates.

27. The message of claim 22, wherein the data in the outer tag corresponds to one or more of an event matching service, a traffic monitoring service, a peer-to-peer communication shopping service;

a user profile service, and a location aware service.

28. The message of claim 22, wherein the inner tag includes one or more attributes for an address, authenticating information;

personal preference information, event description;

a route;

geographically accessible locations;

product description;

traffic conditions;

weather conditions;

a map; and

coordinates transformation.

29. The message of claim 22, wherein the tags conform to the XML specification.

30. A communication system comprising:

a server system configured to receive a request from a client device, said request comprising information identifying a user and a location, the server system being further configured to retrieve one of more records based on said request and a location criterion, each said record comprising an identifier of a second server system configured to provide content that originated from an entity that satisfies the location criterion with respect to the identified location.

31. A communication system as in claim 30, wherein the client device is a mobile device.

32. A communication system as in claim 31, wherein the request from the client device is configured as a XML message.

33. A communication system as in claim 31, wherein the information identifying a location comprises the longitude and the latitude of the client device.

34. A communication system as in claim 31, wherein the location criterion comprises the shortest geographical distance.

35. A communication system as in claim 31, wherein the record retrieved by the server system comprises the name and the URL of the second server system.

36. A communication system as in claim 31, wherein the entity satisfying the location criterion is a mall.

37. A communication system as in claim 36, wherein the content provided by the second server system comprises a name, location, a product of a store in the mall.

38. A communication system as in claim 37, wherein the second server system is further configured to add, delete, update store sale records.

39. A communication system as in claim 30, wherein the second server system is further configured to retrieve a map of the entity from a map server.

40. A communication system comprising:

a server system configured to receive a request from a client device, said request comprising information identifying a user and a location, the server system being further configured to retrieve one of more records based on said request and a location criterion and a user profile, each said record comprising an identifier of a second server system configured to provide content that originated from an entity that satisfies the location criterion with respect to the identified location.

41. The communication system of claim 40, wherein the request further comprises additional data provided at the client device.

42. The communication system of claim 40, wherein the second server being further configured to retrieve from the server system personalization information and to provide, in response to the request, personalized information about services available the geographic area in which the user is located.

53. A method for providing location based services, the method comprising:

receiving a request for a service in a message encoded in a markup language at a first server;

authenticating the request;

determining whether the service is available at a plurality of service modules registered with the first server;

forwarding an error message in response to determining that the service is not available at the plurality of service modules;

forwarding the request to a service module in response to determining that the service is available service module; and

sending a result received from the service module in accordance with the received request to a client device The communication system of claim 40, wherein the.

43. A communication system comprising:

a first server system configured to receive a request from a client device, said request comprising information identifying a user and a second server, the first server being further configured to retrieve from the second server personalization information and to provide in response to the request personalized information about services available the geographic area in which the user is located.

44. A communication system comprising:

a server system configured to provide a list of events to a client device, said list of events matched to a user profile and a location, the server system being further configured to order the list of events according to one or more of a location criterion, a specification, and the user profile.

45. The communication system of claim 44, wherein each event in the list of events is associated with values of a plurality of event attributes, and the user profile comprises values of a plurality of profile attributes, wherein one or more of the event and profile attributes are weighted to reflect their relative significance followed by the generation of a similarity score based on shared attributes and their respective weights.

46. The communication system of claim 45, wherein the similarity score assigned to a profile attribute and an event attribute corresponds to complete similarity, partial similarity or a lack of similarity.

47. The communication system of claim 45, wherein at least one of the profile attributes is standardized using statistics based on substantially all occurrences of the at least one of the profile attributes in a database having a plurality of user profiles.

48. The communication system of claim 47, wherein the statistics include a mean and a standard deviation.

49. The communication system of claim 45, wherein at least one of the event attributes is standardized using statistics based on substantially all occurrences of the at least one of the event attributes in a database having a plurality of events.

50. The communication system of claim 49, wherein the statistics include a mean and a standard deviation.

51. The communication system of claim 45, wherein the similarity scores between events in a database and a specified user profile is calculated by summing, over substantially all events in the database, the square of the differences between standardized event attributes and corresponding standardized specified user profile attributes.

52. The communication system of claim 45, wherein the similarity scores between a specified event and user profiles in a database is calculated by summing, over substantially all users in the database, the square of the differences between standardized user profile attributes and corresponding standardized specified event attributes.

54. The method of claim 44, wherein the result is encoded in a markup language.

55. The method of claim 44, wherein a client device sending the request has a first address different from a sedond address of a client device receiving the result.

56. The method of claim 44, wherein the request is received from a client device and the result redirects the client device to a second server.

57. The method of claim 44, wherein the request is received from a client device and the result includes a second request for additional information for providing the requested service.

58. A method for providing location based information, the method comprising:

receiving a request comprising information identifying a user and a location from a client device;

retrieving one of more records based on said request and a location criterion and a user profile, each said record comprising an identifier of a second server system configured to provide content that originated from an entity that satisfies the location criterion with respect to the identified location; and

sending the identifier to the client device.

59. A method for providing location based information, the method comprising:

receiving a request comprising information identifying a user and a location from a client device;

retrieving personalization information from a server system based on said request; and

providing, in response to the request, personalized information about services available in the geographic area corresponding to the location.

60. The method of claim 59 further comprising providing additional details about a service from the services available in the geographic area in response to receiving a selection of the service from the client device.

61. The method of claim 59, wherein the additional details include information about one or more of sales, promotions, availability of a product or service, alternative sellers of a specified product close to the location, or alternative providers of a specified service close to the location.

62. A method of providing suitable events to a user, the method comprising:

comparing a user profile with a database of events with the aid of profile attributes from the user profile and event attributes;

generating a list of event with corresponding similarity scores;

ordering the list of events according to one or more of a location criterion, a specification, and the similarity scores; and

providing at least an ordered subset of the list of events to the user.

63. The method of claim 62, wherein each event in the list of events is associated with values of a plurality of event attributes, and the user profile comprises values of a plurality of profile attributes, wherein one or more of the event and profile attributes are weighted to reflect their relative significance.

64. The method of claim 63, wherein the similarity scores between events in the database and the user profile are calculated by summing, over substantially all events in the database, the square of the differences between standardized event attributes and corresponding standardized user profile attributes.

65. A method of generating a list of users matched to a specified event at a location, the method comprising:

comparing an event with a database of user profiles with the aid of profile attributes from the user profiles and event attributes;

generating a list of users with their corresponding similarity scores;

ordering the list of user according to one or more of a location criterion, a specification, and the similarity scores; and

providing information regarding the event to at least a subset of the list of users based on their respective similarity scores.

66. The method of claim 65, wherein the similarity scores between user profiles in the database and the event are calculated by summing, over substantially all user profiles in the database, the square of the differences between standardized event attributes and corresponding standardized user profile attributes.

67. The method of claim 65, wherein the similarity scores between events in an event database and the user profiles in the user profile database are calculated by summing, over substantially all events in the database, the square of the differences between standardized event attributes and corresponding standardized user profile attributes.