For more than two years, Nordic wireless carrier TeliaSonera has offered its business and consumer mobile subscriber customers across Scandinavia a variety of location-based applications and wireless services. The wireless operator hosts a Web and wireless subscriber portal where users can choose and use a variety of location-based applications, including consumer "close-to-you" services for nearby business listings, localized traffic and weather, friend finder services, and mobile resource management applications for professional business customers. In addition, third-party application developers can build their own applications using the same standards-based development platform that TeliaSonera used to build its own branded suite of applications. The standards-based platform is based on the Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC), OpenLS specification, which defines a suite of HTTP/XML application programming interfaces for mobile position location, geocoding, reverse geocoding, proximity searching, mapping, and routing.

Work on the development platform began shortly after Sweden's Telia and Finland's Sonera joined forces in 2002. The companies had previously each launched their own location-based applications, but each with its own local map data and different proprietary-protected interfaces. In order to make the system more efficient, a standardized interface was needed for all third-party developers that could easily be expanded for use in all countries where TeliaSonera offers basic mobile phone voice and data services and location-based applications.

Following a formal proposal process that included several GIS vendors and location-based services (LBS) platform providers, TeliaSonera selected Esri Sweden to deploy and configure the platform, basing its decision on ArcIMS software's early and full support for the OpenLS specification. Esri Sweden was tasked with providing maps, routing information, geocoding, and reverse geocoding for TeliaSonera's UNIX servers in Sundsvall, approximately 250 miles north of Stockholm. For the development phase, a separate server system was installed at Esri Sweden.

Tele Atlas/TomTom MultiNet was used as the main map database. Today, this database boasts full coverage of 15 European countries, including Sweden, as well as all of the United States. It includes land-use, detailed traffic, and accurate address information. The data also includes information on public buildings and sports venues. The underlying software is based on ArcSDE for database management and ArcIMS for map publishing, geocoding, reverse geocoding, and routing services. Mobile position location services are supported by Ericsson's Mobile Positioning System.

The importance and need for a standard solution could not be overemphasized according to TeliaSonera. The use of standardized software has been a number-one priority in the wireless telecommunications industry for decades, particularly to keep costs down should an operator decide to change vendor agreements and contracts. For location-based services, several standards groups have contributed specifications to help wireless operators extend their services to larger developer communities. The Open Geospatial Consortium, Open Mobile Alliance, and The Parlay Group have each equally contributed specifications.

Within OGC, the OpenLS committee is devoted to developing interface specifications for use within any enterprise or distributed computing environment where HTTP/XML interfaces serve as the main medium of communication to geospatial platforms and servers. For TeliaSonera, OpenLS has made it possible to publish documents with advanced cartography and to access many different types of data sources, while ensuring each application will be easily portable to other standards-based development platforms. This flexibility was a prerequisite for TeliaSonera to be able to launch positioning services to a broader market and to protect its LBS investments into the future.

TeliaSonera plans to launch many more location-based applications in the months and years to come, concentrating equally on consumer-type applications and more professional applications for mobile resource management and intelligent alert services. GPS and other technologies are also being explored for position enhancements as are hosted Web services for the geospatial development platform.

For more information, contact Lars E. Magnusson, TeliaSonera (e-mail: Lars.E.magnusson@teliasonera.com), or Lars Skog, Esri Sweden (e-mail: Lars.Skog@esri-sweden.com).