MapWeb: A location-based converged communications platform

TLDR: MapWeb is a novel location-based platform that allows a user, via a map interface, to locate in her vicinity buddies and points of interest such as restaurants, hotels, banks, and gas stations, and to communicate with these entities via the communication mechanism of her choice.

Abstract: Location information is a valuable tool in personal communication systems, especially considering the wide variety of communication mechanisms that are available and affordable today. Users can easily access different types of networks (e.g., the public switched telephone network (PSTN), cellular networks and Internet Protocol (IP) networks), and they can choose to communicate via voice, data or video. An interesting issue is how we can blend location information, different communication services, and other advanced mechanisms such as policy control and presence information to build a visually oriented, easily personalized communication platform. We present MapWeb, a novel location-based platform that allows a user, via a map interface, to locate in her vicinity buddies and points of interest such as restaurants, hotels, banks, and gas stations, and to communicate with these entities via the communication mechanism of her choice. The system is built on the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) architecture and is fully extensible at both the server and the client sides. It has many potential applications in settings such as security, emergency response, salvage, traffic management and Olympic-scale activity organization.