XML-Technologies for the Use in Location Based Services

Location Based Services cover a wide variety of possible applications, starting from mass market applications with cellular phones as clients to highly specialised tasks, i. e., forestry. To make data for all these fields of applications available and to stay platform independent the Extensible Markup Language (XML) is used to describe the individual objects. Within this main research topic an analysis takes place which examines the suitability of XML and XML related technologies, like XML Schema, XPath, XPointer, Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), for describing Geo-objects, for data exchange, and for visualisation on different target platforms. During the research the activities of different standardisation bodies (Open GIS Consortium, ISO, …) are observed. The main emphasis is focused on the Geography Markup Language (GML), a XML based modelling language for geographic information. GML is developed in co-operation at Open GIS Consortium and ISO.