MUGGES
MOBILE USER GENERATED GEO SERVICES

Traditional location-based services (LBS) show users as passive consumers, with no participation in generating added value. Only a user’s identity and location are considered to generate personalised location-based content and services; and for these services only a course-grained location system, like GPS, is used.

MUGGES proposes the usage of GNSS technology as a driver of the Mobile User-Generated social service paradigm, which represents a very clear current trend of business innovation. The project will develop the basic components and market-ready MUGGES applications to permit the provision, remote discovery and access of information from one mobile device to another by means of the ‘location’ attribute of context as key service and content characterisation.

In short, the purpose of the project is to design and trial the deployment of a set of new innovative social location-aware mobile user-generated services using GNSS-based ‘intelligent tagging’ as the key driver for widespread adoption.

MUGGES contributes to the Galileo objectives by demonstrating that there is a great mass market potential for LBS in Europe and that the technology is mature enough to deliver real benefits to users.

Description

The project methodology ranges from an early identification and selection of scenarios and business cases to the final evaluation of the business approaches taken from the MUGGES applications and subsequent analysis of data. 
The main innovations in MUGGES are:

• collaborative location models (‘We provide location information’). In MUGGES, users can collaboratively create an emergent infrastructure for LBS, based on their collective contributions;
• user-participative economic models (‘We take part in the business’). Users can profit from their own contributions and take part in the business model of LBS;
• social networks and context in LBS (‘We are part of something, wherever we are’). By integrating position with context, location-based services achieve a higher level of intelligence as perceived by users;
• towards semantic location (‘Using human concepts’). In MUGGES, location information is represented and used in a more human way.

Social mobile location-aware user-generated services will be carried out during a trial, which will remain open after the project ends, providing a long-term behavioural assessment on the adoption of the GNSS-based technology for the proposed mobile exploitation scenarios, where location clearly adds value.

Objectives

The main goal of MUGGES is to demonstrate that the innovative proposed location-aware user-powered service framework can provide real value to users and that by addressing one of the most dynamic segments it can develop a great market potential not yet attempted. This will be achieved by:

• contributing to LBS deployment by demonstrating that the right type of applications can exploit the true potential of GNSS-based tools of any kind, providing value and raising interest in a wide range of potential users;
• innovative, market-ready LBS applications based on the ‘prosumer’ concept: the project develops a set of market-ready MUGGES applications called Mugglets, which are based on the super-prosumer concept that users are producers, providers and consumers of contents from one mobile device to another;
• servicing MUGGES infrastructure: the paradigm shift from the centralised service provision to the mobile user service provision of MUGGES requires a new set of infrastructure tools for either the terminal side or the network side;
• open trial for universal future adoption: MUGGES tries to provide minimum common services for the trial, so the proposed solution is flexible and adaptive to the different potential scenarios;
• developing a new business plan, finding sustainable ways to turn massive mobile usage of user-provided LBS applications into cash.