Location and Personalisation: Delivering Online and Mobility Services
2: Multimedia Content Solutions, BT Exact, Ipswich, UK
A pragmatic look at two particular application technologies - location and personalisation - and presents an understanding of the technical and business impact of these technologies.
Inspec keywords: middleware; content management; language translation; data privacy; Internet; personal information systems; knowledge management; mobile computing; competitive intelligence; customer profiles; advertising
Other keywords: content creation; knowledge management tool kit; Pl@za; W3C P3P; machine based translation; service personalization; personal information; positioning system; Microsoft Net; far eastern language; corporate application; mobile arena; intelligent agent; liberty alliance; user profile; distributed profile information; privacy control; online advertisement; industry technology; location based support system; collaboration middleware platform; business advantage; location based service
Subjects: Information networks; Internet software; Other special applications of computing; Business and administrative computing; Machine translation; Home computing; Mobile, ubiquitous and pervasive computing; Data security
- Book DOI: 10.1049/PBBT008E
- Chapter DOI: 10.1049/PBBT008E
- ISBN: 9780863413384
- e-ISBN: 9781849190343
- Page count: 240
- Format: PDF
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Front Matter
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1 Personalisation - an Overview of its Use and Potential
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Personalisation has often been dismissed due to its lack of success in certain applications. However, it is a much wider subject than is often assumed. The mobile telephone example shows how effective the concept of personalisation can be and how important it is to the way customers behave when selecting and using products and services. In particular, the success factors include: storage of personal contact data; convenience; personal communication; and simplified billing, e.g. pre-pay. The personal profile, when combined with Web Services technology provides an opportunity to integrate many applications and services together to provide cohesive and valuable propositions. Provided that privacy issues are properly tackled and users trust the host service providers, applications can interact in more intelligent ways so that the user is presented with enticing new offers. The development of more sophisticated analysis techniques, in conjunction with the wider pool of profile data, will enhance the value of knowledge-management tools so that information is accessible in a more efficient way and can be shared more easily.
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2 An Overview of Location-Based Services
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A location-based service (LBS) can be described as an application that is dependent on a certain location. Two broad categories of LBS can be defined as triggered and user-requested. In a user-requested scenario, the user is retrieving the position once and uses it on subsequent requests for location-dependent information. This type of service usually involves either personal location (i.e. finding where you are) or services location (i.e. where is the nearest ...). Examples of this type of LBS are navigation (usually involving a map) and direction (routing information). A triggered LBS by contrast relies on a condition set up in advance that, once fulfilled, retrieves the position of a given device. An example is when the user passes across the boundaries of the cells in a mobile network. Another example is in emergency services, where the call to the emergency centre triggers an automatic location request from the mobile network.
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3 Locating Calls to the Emergency Services
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The effective use of location to assist the emergency services requires the co operation of the telecommunications operators, manufacturers and the emergency services. These organisations are working together to provide an enhanced service. Co-ordination between these groups is essential to enable the various components to combine at the appropriate time without undue costs. Mobile operators are concerned that they may be required to provide a level of accuracy that is not commercially justifiable. Some emergency service representatives argue that it would be better to buy more ambulances, for example, than to upgrade PSAPs to the standards necessary for the use of location data. The preferred route to optimise benefit is for the mobile operators to provide their location information as it becomes commercially available as part of their deployment of location-based services. From July 2003 UK mobile operators have been using a standard interface to provide location information to the PSAPs.
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4 Location-Based Services - an Overview of the Standards
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Interest in location-based service (LBS) standards began in the 1990s with the more advanced second generation cellular systems - particularly in GSM. There has been a general drive from mobile operators to increase their average revenue per user (ARPU), and by the late 1990s it was clear that the cellular markets were fast approaching the saturation point in terms of customer penetration rates. Therefore the only way to further increase the turnover of mobile operators was to raise their ARPU by the successful provision of more value-added services, such as the LBS. Mobile systems, such as GSM, have always been heavily driven by standards so as to achieve full interoperability between different suppliers as well as international roaming on to foreign networks. The focus for GSM standards developments through out the 1990s was the European Telecommunications Standards Institute (ETSI) Special Mobile Group (SMG). However, for certain specialist functions, such as the development of end-to-end protocol solutions between mobiles, ETSI SMG has worked with other groups such as the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) Forum.
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5 Profiling - Technology
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This chapter began by exploring the key drivers behind the growing interest in, and approaches taken by, profile hosting, or identity management, solutions. Web Services is a key technology facilitating remote profile storage and has been adopted by Microsoft and Liberty Alliance profiling solutions, which represent the most significant recent developments. Studies of recent profiling technology developments suggest users would prefer to be in control of those suppliers with whom they share data, rather than allowing an automated mechanism to decide, based on unverifiable privacy policies. This is the basis of Microsoft's Net My Services and the Liberty Alliance's developments. The former experienced resistance to the power of a third party holding the entirety of a user's profile data, though Microsoft promises to address these issues. The latter addresses commercial issues by proposing identity federation and user opt-in for sharing of data within 'circles of trust.' Liberty's approach may not go far enough towards enabling a 'common good' identity management infrastructure that is truly open and can enable law-enforcement through tracing criminal activity. This, arguably, can only be provided with input from Government, which is where the proposed EU GUIDE initiative has the potential to add value. BT Exact has developed the profile hosting server to meet both user and business demands for personalisation and has produced a flexible and extensible capability that can be integrated into a wide range of environments and platforms. A logical progression for profile hosting services is that of extending into the digital identity hosting space. This is a future development direction proposed for the PHS as part of a wider initiative based on open standards and Web Services technology.
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6 Service Personalisation and Beyond
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This chapter reports on the state-of-the-art as far as content negotiation, capability and preference profiles description standards is concerned and describes a proposal for a presence-aware personalisation system. Enhancements to mobile communications systems, in order to support presence-awareness concepts, are introduced. Collecting profile data, together with keeping it up to date with the changing needs and context of the user, are important issues.
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7 Profiles - Analysis and Behaviour
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Although the amount of information available to a user is growing, there is a potential to filter and deliver the appropriate level of information to a user based around an accurate, dynamic profile. The development of tools such as Jasper, Peruse and dynamic profiling can proactively support the knowledge worker. By accurately representing the user's current context, it is possible to target relevant information to support the user's current activity.
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8 Device Personalisation - Where Content Meets Device
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With such a diverse client base at present (which is expected to increase in the future), Internet service providers must consider how to create suitable content and a seamless service to the customer's preferred device. Present methods for determining client characteristics are ill defined and range from proprietary solutions to device-inferencing techniques. This is presently acceptable because, in part, most users' Internet experience is via the desktop computer, which has been the focus of most Web site and application design, and because the use of alternative devices such as personal digital assistants (PDA) and WAP-enabled mobile telephones has been limited. With predictions that mobile Internet access will exceed fixed line (desktop) during 2003, the demand for device-specific tailored content will increase and Web sites that can deliver such content will be the focus of much more Internet traffic. The demands placed by this new generation of devices means that present solutions for determining client characteristics will be inadequate. Existing techniques, such as proprietary software (e.g. the AvantGo [1] browser) or inferring from information passed to the Web server (e.g. user-agent information included in the HTTP [2] packet header), are acceptable but not ideal. As the term implies, not all devices will support proprietary software and inferring characteristics from HTTP header information is problematic when devices with similar software have different characteristics or support for different media types. A better solution is to have the device characteristics passed to the server where information content can be tailored to the client's requirements. As more devices and services become available the industry will have to seriously consider how best to support such a widening range of devices. If not, there may be problems with interoperability/compatibility between services, applications and devices. This may lead to a fragmented rather than unifying Internet experience for the majority of users.
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9 Multilingual Information Technology
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The aim of this chapter is to present a very brief overview of some of the issues in producing applications that work in different languages. Firstly, some of the general issues in application design are discussed, and then the chapter focuses more specifically on two areas - display of text and automatic translation.
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10 Smart Tools for Content Synthesis
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Before Gutenburg and others made printing relatively cheap and easy, stories were related through story-tellers and travelling minstrels. The stories thus told were probably never the same twice. The art of the telling would have been to involve, interact and respond to the audience. This art has, to a large degree, been lost. The most popular medium for story telling today is the television, and in television the story-teller does not know who is watching and has very little chance to involve or react to them. Television programmes such as Big Brother and Pop Idol both attempt to involve the audience and react to it through voting. These programmes have both proved very popular and are perhaps a testament to the audience's nascent desire to interact with a story line. As broadband connectivity grows, and as television and the Internet continue to converge, new forms of such interactive, involving and personalised television will emerge. This chapter describes some early results from a set of prototype tools and an associated software architecture that, by using object-based media techniques, allows television programming to be personalised.
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11 Personalised Advertising - Exploiting the Distributed User Profile
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Although the concept of a user profile is well understood and well used on the Internet today, we start from a different assumption - each user already has many profiles held by the service providers with whom the user has been interacting. The overall user profile (called from here on the 'distributed user profile'), therefore, is the set of all of these distributed profiles. The problem with the distributed user profile is that it may not be easy to use. For example, consider the situation where one user has two different profiles with two different providers (held in two different databases) with no link between the two profiles. If privacy was not a concern, and if the user has used the same identity with both providers, then, in principle, the two profiles could be consolidated, but, in the real world, two separate organisations will be obliged by privacy protection acts not to disclose user information. Two possible exceptions to the above arguments would be in cases where: one organisation merges or buys another; explicit permission is asked from each user as to what information can be shared with which other organisations.
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12 Personalisation and Web Communities
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This chapter has described a software system that offers a complete solution for Web communities, in terms of an integrated package for communal as well as personalised services. The Pl@za 3.5 with Knowledge Browser tool-kit comprises components for discussion groups, on-line chats, shared folders, event management, surveys and messaging, as well as personalised services (profile manager, newspaper, contact finder, reference provider). The personal agents help to promote site 'stickiness' and brand loyalty, while the Pl@za Knowledge Browser is an example of a successful integration of personal agent technology, intelligent middleware, and flexible eCommunity platform into a commercial product. The integration was conducted in a manner that preserved the strong features of the independent sub-systems, while the final system operates as one seamless unit resulting from the co-operation between all modules.
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13 Location Information from the Cellular Network - an Overview
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This chapter has described some technologies which can be added to the existing 2G cellular networks in order to make location information about the mobile handset available for use in other applications. For practical and commercial reasons the only currently viable technology makes use of the cell lD information and maps that to latitude and longitude information with an indication of accuracy. Work has been done to measure the accuracy of the MLC and compare it to that provided by the more expensive and more accurate GPS system. Preliminary conclusions from this work suggest that the MLC information is sufficiently accurate to be trusted, provided constraints of the measuring conditions are taken into account - such as the effect of requesting the position of a moving device. Currently the killer corporate application awaits discovery. In order to facilitate this process, BT has made available a simple interface to the MLC which allows application integration through the use of an http or a Web Services interface.
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14 A Multi-Agent System to Support Location-Based Group Decision Making in Mobile Teams
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In this chapter, an agent-based approach to developing location-based asynchronous group decision support systems is proposed, mPower (a system based on that approach) is introduced, and the way in which the above challenges can be resolved is discussed. The mPower application adopts a multi-agent system (MAS) approach. The MAS is considered a key technology to support distributed teams. Intelligent, autonomous agents can collaborate to provide opportunities to reduce communications costs, combat information overload, and improve response times [1,2]. The mPower system contains agents that interact to support distributed group decision-making processes. Each user of the system is supported by an agent that acts as their personal assistant, tracking their current position and using that information to automate part of the group decision-making process. The personal agent behaves independently of the user, according to a predefined decision-support policy, negotiating with other agents to exchange information as and when necessary. The autonomous characteristics of multi-agent systems are essential to facilitate asynchronous GDSS, as occasionally users cannot contribute in a timely manner to all the decision-making processes in which they are involved.
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15 A Million Segments of One - How Personal Should Customer Relationship Management Get?
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Customer relationship management (CRM) is built upon the foundation of a single definitive view of customers which spans functions, channels, products and customer types and drives every customer interaction. CRM purports to recreate the 'traditional corner shop' experience to millions of clients.Ultimately, the future of personalised CRM is dependent on non-intrusive, mutually beneficial and cost-effective strategies delivered through appropriate customer touchpoints. This requires recognition that CRM is more than just deployment of technology - it is a fusion of strategy, process and technology. Companies need to consider what customers want from them and whether the personalised solution that is being proposed reaps financial benefits. Building a million segments of one may work for some companies but others need to consider what kind of relationship their customers want from them and what they can gain from the data that they gather.
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Back Matter
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