The future of Mobile Business is in Location – now, really!??
Listening to the mobile technology, device and communication industries’ big players currently puts into place two core assumptions about how mobile device usage is going to develop within the years to come:
- Location is everything
- Location doesn’t matter anymore
As though these seem quite contradictive at first glance, there is some truth to be found inside these paroles, as soon as one takes a closer look:
While mobile devices give you (and the rest of us…) the power to make more informed decisions depending on where you are and where you intend to be in near future (think of navigation, public transit guidance or ), they also disconnect us from the necessity of presence e.g. at airport counters for check-in or .
Despite these advantages, there is an obvious difference between if you go to let’s say an airport on a daily basis for work, occasionally to catch a flight, to pick-up somebody who is arriving or simply for plane spotting and having fun with your kids.
As J. P. Barton already figured out more than a decade ago, real world situational context is not simply about location, but much more about people, places and the things at hand, along with time and the conditions/limitations you encounter.
Barely none but location, however, has been targeted by technological approaches on an end-user scale this far.
This comes out even more interesting, as the technical and organizational hurdles involved have already appeared to be taken an entire decade ago.
Some of the more relevant reasons, why the industry is nonetheless quite slow in anticipating the market potential coming with services like intelligent tickets, context-aware travel-itinerariues or automated product-matching for webshops, appear to lie in the integration of already existing but widely distributed and differing data sources.
This is, where I believe Linked Data can go a long way in easing the adoption process by providing common means for exchanging information online and in near- or even realtime.
Solutions to practically showcase the application of Semantic Web technology to provide such services are to be developed by our appliance team within the coming moths. Stay tuned. 
