A survey of a personalised location-based service architecture for property hunting

Abstract

Context-awareness in location-based service studies has attracted more and more attention. Awareness of a user's location and the users themselves has become the centre of these services. This paper discusses a survey conducted for developing a personalised location-based property hunting system (LBSPH), and a personalised LBSPH architecture developed from the survey results. What users wanted in the way of essential property and neighbourhood information, the best way to display the information, and the common use cases of such a location-based service (LBS) were identified from the survey. The LBSPH architecture was designed to reflect these preferences.

Keywords::

• location-based services
• personalisation
• property hunting
• survey
• system architecture

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge Amy Chong, Catherine Higgins, Edward Hughes and Jeff Pickering for designing and implementing the two surveys and many respondents for answering the survey questions. This effort is sponsored by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) No. 40901241 and Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang province No. Y5090377. Dr Chen gratefully acknowledges the support of K.C. Wong Education, Hong Kong.