Modelling Service-Providing Location-Based E-communities and the Impact of User Mobility

Abstract

As short range wireless networks (such as wireless local area networks (WLANs) and Bluetooth) become widespread, an infrastructure is emerging on which we envision advanced value-added services. Such an infrastructure can provide access to not only services on the greater Web but also services which are locally relevant and more tailored to the user’s current context (e.g., the user’s location, the function of a place the user is currently at, other people who are also in the same network at that time, etc). Such short range wireless networks are convenient technology for the creation of location-based e-communities or LE-communities which are counterparts of real-world location spaces. Each LE-community provides services to users and users can participate in many LE-communities. Hence, there would be a proliferation of services to a user available via numerous LE-communities, and these services would continually change as the user moves physically into and out of the range of the wireless networks (and so, into and out of their corresponding LE-communities). In this paper, we study the impact of user mobility on services provided by LE-communities. Our contribution here is a model to enable reasoning about which services can be invoked as the user moves, and present operators for combining the services offered by different LE-communities inspired by operators for combining logic programs. Our model is a first step towards a programming model for applications involving LE-communities.