A Perspective on Location Services, Mobile Entrepreneurship & Startup Life

Sensing is going mobile and people-centric. Sensors for activity recognition and GPS for location are now being shipped in millions of top end mobile phones. This complements other sensors already on mobile phones such as high-quality cameras and microphones. At the same time we are seeing sensors installed in urban environments in support of more classic environmental sensing applications, such as, real-time feeds for air-quality, pollutants, weather conditions, and congestion conditions around the city. Collaborative data gathering of sensed data for people by people, facilitated by sensing systems comprised of everyday mobile devices and their interaction with static sensor webs, present a new frontier at the intersection between pervasive computing and sensor networking.

[via: UrbanSense08 - International Workshop on Urban, Community, and Social Applications of Networked Sensing Systems, took part Nov '08]

Why do I blog this?

A great state-of-the-art sum-up, more and more applications facilitate the available sensors on mobile phones and the next step is the sharing of this data not just within your social network but also with your sensor-enriched surroundings. A lot of potential and it’s clear that sensor data is becoming pervasive and demands to be integrated into everyday applications and services. New programmable smartphones, improved tools and libraries to access sensor data and the Internet as the platform are a solid foundation to build interesting prototypes.

In an upcoming series of blog posts I will write about geospatial web content, location-based services and the Geo / Geospatial Semantic Web. The focus will always be on the location aspect of web content but why is location something special?

Some brainstorming about location:

• Definition: GPS coordinates (WGS84), extents/bounding boxes, shapes, gazetteers, Geonames, OpenStreetMap, Where on Earth IDs
• Distance: nearby, vicinity, neighborhood
• Visualization: map vs. textual representation
• Annotation: manual (drag a marker on a map) vs. automatic (GPS sensor)
• Application: business vs. consumer centric
• Services: location-based services, citizen journalism, proximity dating, virtual walls, location-based messaging, context-sensing, emergency management,…
• Tools: GIS, Web GIS, Mashups
• Usage: location as enabler, location as requirement, location as support mechanism
• Perspective: real-time user location, friends nearby, setting location on demand

There are many sides to consider when thinking abaout location data and how it can be used in new and better intgrated ways.

Relevance for my thesis:

There is a large amount of geo-referenced user-generated content available in the Websphere, distributed over dozens or hundred of service providers. This aggregated data provides detailed contextual information for events, news, places or businesses. Semantically linking this user-generated contextual information to activities from sensors and sensor networks, e.g. seeismic wave notifications from earthquake detection system, can help to bridge the two worlds of the social and the sensor web.

Relevance for Tagcrumbs:

Every placemark in Tagcrumbs has a GPS coordinate attached to it, this location annotation provides the foundation to show placemarks, photos or wikipedia articles nearby, the distance to your current location or the visualization via KML or GeoRSS on maps. In the backend there is a PostgreSQL/PostGIS relational database optimized for geospatial queries (e.g. distance queries). Location matters!

Attribution: Screenshot provided under CC by Locify on Flickr.