PLASH: An ESB-based Platform for Developing and Deploying Location Aware Services with SOC Concepts

PLASH, Platform for Location Aware Service with Human Computation, is a location aware service (LAS) development and provision platform designed to satisfy particular needs encountered in geospatial researches and areas in pervasive computing. The generalized requirements are: supporting heterogeneous clients, working with heterogeneous service providers, providing open development and facilitating development. The design of PLASH heavily adopts concepts from service-oriented component model (SOCM) and improves some of the concepts to make the platform suit LAS development. SOCM is a hybrid approach that infuses service-oriented principles into component oriented model. This paper adopted such paradigm to take advantage of several important SOCM features and features inherited from service oriented computing (SOC). The features include allowing service heterogeneity, simplifying development model and dynamism. The PLASH realizes the design by building components on an enterprise service bus. The design of PLASH has served as a model for approaching problems that can be characterized by the aforementioned requirements. Finally, we introduce two practical case studies to verify the reasonability and feasibility of this work.