Over the last few decades, the development of geospatial technologies has converged with a variety of formal information technology disciplines (Zwartjes in Eur J Geogr 9(4):138–151, 2018; Jackson and Schell in Directions Magazine, 2009). The rapidly growing location-based services seamlessly integrate data and technologies from Earth observation (EO), Geographic Information System (GIS), Geographic Position System (GPS), and wireless and mobile communications (Huang et al. in J Location Based Servi 12(2):63–93, 2018).