Location services
Location services in IBM MobileFirst™ Platform Foundation provide you with the opportunity to create differentiated services that are based on a user location, by collecting geolocational and WiFi data, and by feeding the location data and triggers to business processes, decision management systems, and analytics systems.
Geolocation is a powerful differentiator of mobile apps. Yet because geolocation coordinates must be constantly polled to understand where a mobile device is located, the resulting stream of geographic information can be difficult to manage without exhausting resources such as battery and network. IBM MobileFirst Platform Foundation includes location services that handle multiple geo modalities such as GPS, WiFi sampling, and interpolation. You can set policies for acquiring geolocation data and transmitting it to the server in order to optimize battery and network usage.
- A fast food outlet could start preparing food for a customer, based on data collected regarding his geographical location, so that the food is ready just as the customer arrives to collect.
- A warehouse could improve the efficiency of its processes by using locational data from its delivery vehicles to ensure that goods are removed from storage and made ready for collection.
- Shopping outlets could respond more readily to the needs of regular customers by using geo-locational data.
Location services can also be used to improve internal efficiency within an organization, for example, by understanding behavior and trends in application usage, and thus driving ongoing improvement.
Location services are currently supported on hybrid Android, iOS, and Windows Phone Silverlight 8.
The following figure shows how the location services feature works:
Application code on the mobile device, in the form of an acquisition policy, controls the collection of data from device sensors. The collected data is referred to as the device context. When a change occurs in the device context, such as a change in the geolocation of the device, or the fact that it has just entered a WiFi zone, triggers can be activated. The triggers specify that an action should occur: either a callback function is called, or an event is sent to the server, based on the device context.
Events are created by triggers and application code, and include a snapshot of the device context at the time of their creation. Events are buffered on the client, and are transmitted to the server periodically. The server might process the event much later. During the event transmission process, the device context is synchronized transparently to the server.
To handle the events, the server uses adapter application code. This code sets up event handlers on the server, which filter event data and pass matching events to a callback function. The code also accesses the client's device context (its location and WiFi network information) and sets an application context. Server activities and received events are logged, together with the device and application contexts, for future reporting and analytics.