Patent ID: 8689277

Claim:
A method of providing a location of a target device to an application implementing a location based service, the method comprising: receiving a request for a location reference from the target device at a first location server; identifying at least one data source in response to the request; generating the location reference to include the identification of the at least one data source; providing the location reference to the target device, the target device providing the location reference to the application, subsequently receiving a request for a location of the target device from the application at the first location server, the request including the location reference previously generated by the first location server, the location reference comprising a user reference referring to user information corresponding to the target device and stored in the at least one data source; retrieving the user information from the at least one data source using the user reference extracted from the location reference; determining the location of the target device based at least in part on the retrieved user information; and providing the determined location of the target device to the application.