Context-Awareness in Location Based Services in the Big Data Era

Integrating contextual information into the process of location-basedservice delivering is an emerging trend towards more advanced techniques aimingat personalization and intelligence of location-based services in the big data era.This chapter provides a systematic review of current context-aware location-basedservice systems using big data by analysing the methodological and practicalchoices that their developers made during the main phases of the context awarenessprocess (i.e. context acquisition, context representation, and context reasoning andadaptation). Specifically, the chapter analyses ten location-based services, developedover the five years 2010-2014, by focusing on (1) context categories, datasources and level of automation of the context acquisition, (2) context modelsapplied for context representation, and (3) adaptation strategies and reasoningmethodologies used for context reasoning and adaptation. For each of these steps, aset of research questions and evaluation criteria are extracted that we use to evaluateand compare the surveyed context-aware location-based services. The results of thiscomparison are used to outline challenges and opportunities for future research inthis research field.