GUESS : on the prediction of mobile users’ movement in space

Abstract

The increasing availability of mobile networks and devices motivate the development of new paradigms of interaction between users, and between a user and the surrounding environment. When the position of a user is known, location-aware applications can adapt their behaviour accordingly to that position. This usual behaviour of location-aware applications can be enhanced in order to turn these applications proactive, providing services that can be helpful to the user before he/she asks for them. For this kind of behaviour, location-aware applications need to anticipate the user’s position, predicting where the user is going to be in the future. This chapter discusses the prediction of movement in space by looking at the topological constraints existing in the geographical space in which the user is moving. The obtained results show that the topological distance can be used as an alternative or as a complement to the geometrical distance normally used in map-matching techniques.