Two Approaches for Successful Mapping GPS Data to Underlying Road Network in Location-based Services

Latest data acquisition techniques facilitate the provision of real-time location-based services. With the coming about of miniature and cheap GPS receivers and cellular phones, new horizons have been opened for such services. The mobile telephony and Internet technology within the GIS environment has resulted in introducing new services and applications with higher degrees of user satisfaction. Recently, much work has been done in feasibility studies and identifying the type of services that can be offered to mobile persons in an environment equipped with these three. However, no equivalent attention has been paid to the data that will be used for running such services. The acquired data have some degree of uncertainty mainly due to error associated with acquisition devices and limitations in representing continuous data temporally. The central theme of this paper concerns enhancing accuracy of data obtained from GPS receivers by proposing mapping mechanisms, in which the underlying database/GIS that can match obtained data to actual locations in road networks, is taken into account and plays an important role