COVID-19 has changed our normal lives significantly and made the future quite uncertain. As a result of this, the organizing committee of LBS 2020 has reconsidered the plans for the 16th International Conference on Location Based Services with the safety of the participants at its heart. The main changes are:

• LBS 2020 will be postponed to November 2021, still in UK. In other words, LBS 2020 will turn LBS 2021. The exact venue and dates will be announced in the coming months.
• Full paper submissions related to the conference topics are still welcome for this year (2020), and will be directly considered for the Journal of Location Based Services. A quick review and turnaround time is planned. Authors of accepted full papers will have an option to present their work during regular conference sessions in 2021.
• A half-day online mini-event dedicating to the topic on“LBS and COVID-19” will be organized around 12 November 2020, consisting of invited short presentations and a panel discussion with internationally recognized scientists and researchers. Authors of accepted full papers in the Special Issue on “Contact-Tracing, Apps and location-based data for the COVID-19 Pandemic” in the Journal of LBS will be also invited to give short presentations and join the panel discussion. Please feel invited to submit for this special issue by 31 August 2020.

More details of these changes can be found at https://lbsconference.org/

The ICA Commission on Location Based Services and University College London (UCL) are pleased to invite you to the 16th International Conference on Location Based Services (LBS 2020), which will take place in London, UK on 11-13 November 2020.

Built on the success of previous conferences in this series, LBS 2020 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 Springer Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography. The best full and work in progress papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the Journal of Location Based Services and Journal of Navigation.

Important Dates:

• Pre-conference workshop and exhibition proposal: 15 March 2020
• Full paper submission: 15 May 2020
• Work in progress submission: 14 June 2020
• Notification of full paper acceptance: 10 July 2020
• Notification of work in progress acceptance: 01 September 2020
• Camera-ready full paper (for the Springer book): 01 September 2020
• Showcase submission: 13 September 2020
• Early registration ends, author registration deadline: 13 September 2020
• Camera-ready work in progress: 01 October 2020

More information regarding LBS 2020 can be found at lbsconference.org. We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you in London!

The preliminary program of LBS 2019 is just published online. It features a keynote by Prof. Ioannis Giannopoulos (TU Wien), a panel discussion on “the future of mobile cartography: open research challenges”, 9 oral sessions covering different aspects of LBS, and an interactive poster/showcase session. All these promise a very interesting conference.

You can still register for LBS 2019 at: https://lbsconference.org/registration/. Look forward to seeing you at the conference.

The ICA Commission on Location Based Services and TU Wien are pleased to invite you to the 15th International Conference on Location-Based Services (LBS 2019), which will take place in Vienna, Austria on 11-13 November 2019.

Built on the success of previous conferences in this series, LBS 2019 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 (also available as a PDF). We call for full papers, work in progress, and showcases. High-quality full paper submissions are intended to be published in the open-access Advances in Cartography and GIScience of the ICA Series. The best full and work in progress papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the Journal of Location Based Services.

Important Dates:
• 1 June 2019, Submission of full papers
• 15 July 2019, Submission of work in progress
• 1 August 2019, Notification of acceptance for full papers
• 15 September 2019, Notification of acceptance for work in progress papers
• 15 September 2019, Submission of showcases
• 18 September 2019, Early bird registration

More information regarding LBS 2019 can be found at lbsconference.org. We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you in Vienna!

The 29th International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2019) will be held in Tokyo, Japan, July 15-20, 2019. Location-based services will be one of the key topics in this conference. The deadline for submitting full papers and abstracts  is due on 5 December 2018 and 19 December 2018, respectively.

Immediately before ICC 2019, the LBS Commission is organising two pre-conference events:

• Workshop on “User Experience Design for Mobile Cartography: Setting the Agenda” (Mobile Map UX), 11-12 July 2019, Beijing, China: organised jointly by the ICA Commissions on Cognition, LBS, VA, and Use. We solicit 2-page position papers proposing emerging issues and pressing needs regarding Mobile Map UX. The submission deadline is 1 February 2019.
• International Symposium on Location-Based Big Data (LocBigData 2019), 15 July 2019, Tokyo, Japan: organised jointly by the ICA Commissions on LBS and Geospatial Analysis and Modelling. You are invited to submit work-in-progress or position papers with a length of 600-1200 words to the symposium. The submission deadline is February 15, 2019. All submissions will be peer reviewed. We intend to have a special issue at an international journal. Selected authors will be invited to submit full papers for consideration in the special issue. More details will follow.

Please consider submitting your research work to the events. Look forward to your submissions, and to meeting you at the workshop/symposium.

The ICA Commission on Location Based Services is happy to announce that the LBS Research Agenda has been published online as an open access paper in the Journal of Location Based Services. For more details, please refer to https://lbs.icaci.org/research-agenda/. 

• LBS Research Agenda
  Haosheng Huang, Georg Gartner, Jukka M. Krisp, Martin Raubal & Nico Van de Weghe (2018): Location based services: ongoing evolution and research agenda, Journal of Location Based Services, DOI: 10.1080/17489725.2018.1508763

A multi-phase collaborative process was adopted during the development of this research agenda: Based on the 31 one-paragraph proposals of ‘“big challenges in LBS”, and the feedback and results of the workshop at LBS 2016 and conference session at ICC 2017, we identified a list of “key research challenges” that should be addressed to bring LBS to a higher level to better benefit our society and environment. Thank you to all the participants during this process!

The current research agenda highlights a series of research challenges in six broad areas: “Ubiquitous positioning”, “Context modelling and context-awareness”, “Mobile user Interfaces and interaction”, “Analysis of LBS-generated data”, “User studies and evaluation”, and “Social and behavioural implication of LBS”. As the research agenda is not set in stone, you are encouraged to provide your comments here.

We hope this research agenda helps to motivate further LBS research and stimulate collective efforts. Particularly, through the work of the ICA Commission on LBS and the Journal of LBS, a series of activities (conferences, workshops, and special issues) on LBS will be organized in the coming years to bring together the broader community to answer these open research questions, as well as to “positively” shape the future of our mobile information society.

One of these activities is the annual international conference series on LBS. Next year the conference will be hosted by TU Wien, Vienna, Austria, in November 2019. More details regarding the conference will be available in the coming months at http://lbsconferences.org.

The ETH Zurich and ICA Commission on Location-Based Services are pleased to invite you to the 14th International Conference on Location-Based Services (LBS 2018), which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland on 15-17 January 2018.

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 Springer’s Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography Series. The best full and work in progress papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the Journal of Location Based Services.

Updates of the conference

• Keynote Speaker: Johannes Schöning, University of Bremen
• Sponsor: Esri Switzerland, and Esri
• Student travel grants available

Important Dates:

• 12 July 2017, Submission of full & work-in-progress papers
• 29 September 2017, Notification of acceptance for full & work-in-progress papers
• 13 October 2017, Camera-ready full & work-in-progress papers
• 15 November 2017, Submission of showcases

More information regarding LBS 2018 can be found at lbsconference.org. We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you in Zurich!

Regarding the upcoming International Cartographic Conference (ICC 2017) in Washington, DC, we would like to bring a number of interesting things for your attention.

1. Pre-ICC symposium on location-based social media and tracking data

Immediately before ICC 2017, the LBS Commission and the Commission on Geospatial Analysis and Modelling are organizing an international symposium on location-based social media and tracking data (LSMTD 2017), on July 1-2, 2017.

After reviewing, we have accepted 27 oral presentations for the symposium. These presentations will be organized into 6 oral sessions, covering “theories and data models”, “participation and user tasks”, “traffic modelling”, “analyzing human dynamics”, “research applications using location-based big data”, and “place modelling”.  The symposium program is available as a PDF here.

For more details regarding the symposium, please refer to https://gam.icaci.org/symposium2017/.

2. LBS sessions at ICC 2017

We are very excited to feature 5 oral sessions devoted to LBS, covering wayfinding, indoor and outdoor navigation, mobile cartography, mobility analysis and privacy. These sessions will be on July 3 afternoon (Monday) and July 4 (Tuesday). Please check https://www.eventscribe.com/2017/ICC/SearchByBucket.asp?h=Browse%20by%20Track (please search for “Location Based Services” to find these sessions).

Furthermore, a dedicated session is planned on July 3 at 4:10 PM – 5:30 PM to discuss the LBS research agenda. Feedback from the session will be used to further refine the research agenda.

We will also have our business meeting on July 4 (Tuesday) at 12:30 PM – 1:20 PM. You are all welcome to this meeting. At the meeting, we will propose some ideas for future commission related activities in the coming years. We would be also very happy to hear suggestions and proposals of events and activities from you.

Look forward to seeing many of you at ICC 2017 and at the LBS sessions.

The ICA Commission on Location-Based Services and ETH Zurich are pleased to invite you to the 14th International Conference on Location-Based Services (LBS 2018), which will take place in Zurich, Switzerland on 15-17 January 2018.

Built on the success of previous conferences in this series, LBS 2018 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 (also available as a PDF). We call for full papers, work in progress, and showcases. High-quality full paper submissions are intended to be published in Springer’s Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography Series. The best full and work in progress papers will be invited to submit an extended version to the Journal of Location Based Services.

Important Dates:
• 12 July 2017, Submission of full & work-in-progress papers
• 29 September 2017, Notification of acceptance for full & work-in-progress papers
• 13 October 2017, Camera-ready full & work-in-progress papers
• 15 November 2017, Submission of showcases

More information regarding LBS 2018 can be found at lbsconference.org. We are looking forwards to your contributions and to meeting you in Zurich!

Organizers:
General Chair: Martin Raubal (ETH Zurich)
PC Chairs: Peter Kiefer (ETH Zurich), Haosheng Huang (University of Zurich), Nico Van de Weghe (Ghent University)