The LBS conference series started in 2002 in Vienna, Austria, initiated by Prof. Georg Gartner from TU Wien. Since 2015, it has become the annual conference of the ICA Commission on Location Based Services. In the past years, the LBS conferences travelled around the world – with venues in Hong Kong, Salzburg, Nottingham, Shanghai, Vienna, Augsburg, Zurich, Glasgow, and Munich.

In 2023, the LBS conference was hosted by Ghent University, Belgium, on November 20-22, 2023. Around 90 participants from all over the world gathered in the historical city center of Ghent. The conference was opened by the Conference Chairs Prof. Haosheng Huang and Prof. Nico Van de Weghe.

Opening session of the 18th International Conference on Location Based Services – LBS 2023 held in Ghent, Belgium

The conference featured five keynotes by Prof. Krzysztof Janowicz from University of Vienna, Bart Rosseau from Digitaal Vlaanderen, Prof. Wim Hardyns from Ghent University (UGent), Prof. Sofie Van Hoecke from UGent-imec, and Prof. Sidharta Gautama from UGent.

A total of 50 oral presentations have been given in 10 single-stream sessions over the two and half days. Another 4 showcases were presented all the conference. These oral presentations, showcases and posters provide a general picture of recent research activities related to the domain of LBS. Such activities emerged in the last years, especially concerning issues of GeoAI, outdoor/indoor positioning, smart environment, spatial modeling, personalization, context-awarenesss, cartographic communication, novel user interfaces, crowdsourcing, social media, big data analysis, usability and privacy.

Oral sessions of LBS 2023

Oral sessions of LBS 2023

Showcases at LBS 2023

Showcases at LBS 2023

The conference also featured a “Best Paper session” on the 3rd conference day.

• The best full paper award at LBS2023 went to Eva Nuhn, Kai Hamburger and Sabine Timpf from University of Augsburg, Germany for their full paper on “Mapping olfactory cues for wayfinding – A theoretical approach and an empirical study”.

• The winner of the best short paper award at LBS2023 is “Towards Personalized Pedestrian Route Recommendation Based on Implicit Visual Preference”, authored by Lin Che, Martin Raubal and Peter Kiefer from ETH Zurich.

With the co-sponsoring of ESRI BeLux and ISPRS International Journal of Geo-Information, we were also happy to offer Travel Grants to support 7 young researchers to participate in the conference.

A selection of peer-reviewed full papers will be published in the Journal of Location Based Services. Accepted work in progress submissions are included in the conference online proceeding.

Besides the technical and scientific program, the conference provided several social networking opportunities, including an ice-breaker reception on the first day and a conference dinner in a traditional restaurant with famous Ghent cuisine on the 2nd day.

More details and photos regarding LBS 2023 can be found at https://lbs2023.lbsconference.org/.

With this post, we would like to provide some updates regarding LBS 2023 (https://lbs2023.lbsconference.org/), which will be held in Ghent, Belgium on 20-22 November 2023.

1) We have finished the peer-review processes. Finally, we accepted 6 full papers and 38 work-in-progress submissions for oral presentations. There will be also several interactive showcases. Several keynotes are being planned, and will announced by the end of September.

2) The conference registration is now open at https://lbs2023.lbsconference.org/registration/. The early-bird registration ends on October 15.

We also updated the conference website with some information like travel grants for young researchers.

We are looking forward to seeing you at LBS 2023 in Ghent.

Due to multiple requests and the holiday season, the deadline for work-in-progress submissions has been extended to September 1. We also welcome showcase submissions.

Accepted work-in-progress submissions will be published in the online proceedings of the conference (with a DOI), openly available on the conference website.

We are also pleased to announce two awards at LBS 2023: one Best paper award, and one Best work in progress award. Meanwhile, travel grants will be available for young researchers for applications. More details will come in early September.

For more details regarding LBS 2023, please refer to https://lbsconference.org/

Look forward to your submissions, as well as to seeing you at the conference.

The ICA Commission on Location Based Services and Ghent University are pleased to invite you to the 18th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2023), which will take place in Ghent, Belgium on 20—22 November 2023.

Built on the success of previous conferences in this series, LBS 2023 aims to offer a common ground to colleagues from various disciplines and practice where they can meet, interact and exchange knowledge, experience, plans and ideas on how LBS can and could be improved and on how it will influence both science and society.

The Call for Papers is currently open. We call for full papers, work in progress and showcases. High-quality full paper submissions are intended to be published in Journal of Location Based Services.

We are also pleased to announce two awards at LBS 2023: one Best paper award, and one work in progress award. Meanwhile, travel grants will be available for young researchers whose submissions are accepted. More details will follow.

Important Dates:

• Full paper submission: 1 June 2023
• Work in progress submission: 15 July 2023
• Notification of full paper acceptance: 1 August 2023
• Showcase submission: 10 September 2023
• Notification of work in progress acceptance: 16 September 2023
• Early registration ends, author registration deadline: 30 September 2023
• Conference: 20-22 November 2023

More information regarding LBS 2023 can be found at lbsconference.org. We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you!

In this post, we would like to provide a few updates on the commission activities in the coming year, which you will see below. Thank you for your support to the LBS Commission in the past years. Look forward to working with you in 2023 and to seeing you in person.

Have a pleasant holiday season and a prosperous New Year 2023!

List of planned activities in 2023:

1. 18th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2023), Ghent, Belgium, 20-22 November 2023, more details in January 2023 at https://lbsconference.org/

2. The 31st International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2023), Cape Town, South Africa, 13-18 August 2023; Full paper deadline 9 January 2023, Abstract deadline 16 January 2023; https://icc2023.org/

3. A pre-ICC symposium on Location Based Big Data and GeoAI is planned immediately before ICC 2023, on 12 August 2023, more details will follow in January 2023.

4. Journal of Location Based Services (https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tlbs20), which the LBS Commission greatly supports, is looking forward to receiving relevant submissions in the coming year. Note that the Journal offers an annual “Best Paper Award”.

During 12-14 September 2022, the 17th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2022) has been successfully held at TU Munich, Germany. The conference was organized by the ICA Commission on Location Based Services, and hosted by Prof. Liqiu Meng and Prof. Jukka Krisp and their teams at TU Munich and University Augsburg.

The conference featured two keynote presentations of Georg Gartner from TU Wien and Harvey Miller from Ohio State University. A total of 39 oral presentations have been given in 8 single-stream sessions over three days. These oral presentations provide a general picture of recent research activities related to the domain of LBS. Such activities emerged in the last years, especially concerning issues of outdoor/indoor positioning, smart environment, spatial modelling, personalization, context-awarenesss, cartographic communication, novel user interfaces, social media, big data analysis, usability, ethics, and privacy.

Papers accepted in the category “Full papers” and accepted in the category “Work in progress” (double-blind peer-review based on full papers) are published as online proceedings LBS2022:

• Krisp, Meng, Kumke, Huang (eds.) (2022) Proceedings 17th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS2022), Munich / Augsburg, Germany, September 12-14.

The next LBS conference has been planned and will be hosted by Prof. Haosheng Huang and Prof. Nico Van de Weghe at Ghent University (Belgium) in November 2023. We look forward to meeting you there.

More details regarding LBS 2022 can be found at http://lbsconference.org/.

Please consider submitting a full paper or an abstract to the 17th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2022) in Munich, Germany, September 12.-14. 2022;

http://lbsconference.org

– The deadline for full papers is March 15th, 2022
– The deadline for abstracts is June 1st, 2022

Travel grants will be available for young researchers. Priority will be given to those whose full papers are accepted for the conference. More details at https://conferences.lfk.lrg.tum.de/lbs2022/travelgrant.html

We are looking forward to welcoming you in Munich!

Prof. Dr. Jukka M. Krisp
Prof. Dr. Liqiu Meng
Dr. Holger Kumke
and the LBS2022 Organizing Committee

The ICA Commission on Location Based Services and Commission on Geospatial Analysis and Modeling are pleased to invite you to the International Symposium on Geospatial Approaches to Combating Covid-19, which will take place hybird online and in Florence, Italy on 13—14 December 2021.

There is an inherent spatial dimension in the spread of infectious diseases. A large body of studies and practices have evidenced the importance of spatial thinking and the effectiveness of geospatial technologies in understanding Covid-19. It is critical to share research findings quickly so as to maximize the use of them in the world’s collective efforts. This symposium calls for submissions of Covid-19 research from the geospatial perspective.

Thie symposium features 34 oral presentations, organized into 7 sessions.

For more details of the symposium, please refer to https://gam.icaci.org/symposium2021/

Hope to see many of you at the symposium.

We are happy to announce that the special issue on “Geospatial Big Data Analytics for Smart Cities” in Computers, Environment and Urban Systems has been published online on November 2021.

This special issue is an outcome of the International Symposium on Location-Based Big Data 2019 (LocBigData 2019, held in Tokyo, Japan), which offered a platform for researchers from various disciplines and perspectives to share ideas and research findings and to discuss the open challenges and future research challenges in this emerging field.

The special issue consists of 9 papers, which reflect the front-end snapshots of current research activities in this field, and illustrate how LocBigData analytics can help to achieve smart cities.

The paper on “Analytics of location-based big data for smart cities: Opportunities, challenges, and future directions” provides a state-of-the-art review on LocaBigData analytics and identifies a series of open and key research challenges that should be addressed to advance the emerging field of LocBigData analytics or urban analytics to enable smart and sustainable cities (see the following figure for a visual summary).