Integration of Similar Location Based Services Proposed by Several Providers Roula Karam 1 , Franck Favetta 1 , Rima Kilany², and Robert Laurini 1 1 INSA-Lyon, LIRIS CNRS UMR5205, Université de Lyon F-69621 Villeurbanne, France {roula.karam, franck.favetta, robert.laurini}@insa-lyon.fr ² Université Saint Joseph, ESIB, B.P:11-514, Beirut, Lebanon {rima.kilany@usj.edu.lb} Abstract. Due to the fact that mobile devices are in widespread use, many applications including Location Based Services (LBS) had been involved to deliver relevant information to customers anywhere at any time and thus based on their profile and geographical position. However, with the increasing number of geographical data and distributed geospatial applications with heterogeneous databases, many problems may arise related to 1) the interoperability of geographical databases, 2) the integration of geospatial data / metadata of services and 3) the development of user friendly visual portals on mobiles. As many LB standards like OGC and applications were demonstrating the feasibility of portals from a unique provider, the objective of this paper is to pursue further in the approach of generating visual portals by allowing many providers to commercialize their services overlaid on a unique base-map. Furthermore, we have implemented this approach via our prototype MPLoM (Multi-Providers LBS on Mobile Devices). Keywords: GIS, LBS, Cartography Graphic Semiology, Ontology, OWL, GML, XQuery, GUI on PDA, WMS, WFS, Web Services, Integration 1 Introduction The field of LBS, which emerged a few years ago, presents many challenges in terms of research and industrial concerns. We mean by Location-based services (LBS), a particular type of web services used via web browsers, but those LBS’s are efficiently used in applications integrating services data/metadata based on the user’s location(spatial coordinates LLA: Longitude, Latitude, Altitude). Examples of such applications include: tracking (device oriented) or information entertainment /navigation and many others (person oriented). [1] Let us take the application to look at the nearest restaurant in your area with the navigation instructions to get there: First of all, we might encounter the answer of an Italian restaurant listed by two different providers, not exactly located at the same place (50 meters of difference) due to the inaccurate precision from Satellite or Radio Mobile positioning systems. The same Italian restaurant is named “Carlo’s Pizzeria” in the first one and “Da Carlo trattoria” in the second one, visualized by different cartographic symbols. The goal is to consider them as the same object.