Scalable and Mashable Location-Oriented Web Services

Web-based access to services increasingly moves to location-oriented scenarios, with either the client being mobile and requesting relevant information for the current location, or with a mobile or stationary client accessing a service which provides access to location-based information. The Web currently has no specific support for this kind of service pattern, and many scenarios use proprietary solutions which result in vertical designs with little possibility to share and mix information across various services. This paper describes an architecture for providing access to location-oriented services which is based on the principles of Representational State Transfer (REST) and uses a tiling scheme to allow clients to uniformly access location-oriented services. Based on these Tiled Feeds, lightweight access to location-oriented services can be implemented in a uniform and scalable way, and by using feeds, established patterns of information aggregation, filtering, and republishing can be easily applied.