Multi-providers Location-based Services for Mobile-tourism: a Use Case for Location and Cartographic Integrations on Mobile Devices

Nowadays, there is an urgent need for sophisticated mobile marketing techniques based on detailed knowledge of customer?s context; Tourists, who request information while on the move, intentionally seek quick and precise answer either from Google Maps, Bing or Yahoo Maps portals, etc. However, the quality of these map providers heavily relies on the relevance of their geographic datasets. So, to reduce inconsistency and rigidness in the results, a two-fold scenario had been adopted. First, these datasets should be collected from many geographic databases such as yellow pages, gazetteers. Then, nearly-duplicated Points of Interest, with slightly different records for their place names, geographic footprints, alphanumeric details and icons, should be integrated using appropriate fusion algorithms and geographic ontology reasoning in order to ensure a more precise and customizable map for the mobile user. Keywords: Geographic Information Science (GIS), Location-Based Services (LBS), Cartography, Ontology, Semiology, Web Services, Mobile technology, Semantic Web, m-tourism.