8.1 About the Location Tracking Server

As location becomes an increasingly important aspect of our lives, and as location-sensing devices become ubiquitous, there is an increasing demand for applications to be able to monitor subscriber location data continuously. The monitoring of the location data may translate into alerts being generated in the system.

For example, a trucking company may want to monitor its network of 10,000 trucks as they move along their specified routes towards their destinations. They may want to track the movement of trucks within a specified range of the route and expect notifications to be generated to detect undesirable deviations the vehicles from their desired routes. Proactive location-based services (LBSs) generalize such applications that track locations of subscribers inside or outside a specified region for various purposes, such as location-based advertising and notifications about friends nearby.

The Oracle Spatial location tracking server provides:

• A simple framework for setting up a location tracking network within the database through a PL/SQL interface

• An API for continuous location monitoring of objects within a tracking network

• A queuing mechanism for incoming location updates and tracking requests and for outgoing relevant notifications, using Oracle Advanced Queuing

• Efficient, continuous location monitoring for thousands of relevant objects within the database