There’s so much happening in the “location” space it’s easy to discount it as a buzzword. It doesn’t help that the phrase “Location Based Service” gets misused in ways that severely limit it’s scope – I’m looking at you, plethora of check-in apps.

But, location and, more so, context-awareness are the real deal, and as our understandings of them evolve we’re going to see more formal structures and guidelines for their use – particularly for developers and service designers.

The OpenGEO group are leading the way in developing standards for use in location services. By providing a set of common and desirable system attributes they not only provide guidelines for new applications and services, but also give us a criteria to assess existing ones. If you call yourself a location-based-service, you’re probably doing much of what they suggest anyway. However, it’s still worth checking out. Just in case.

Once you’ve got your head around those and are interested in getting in on the ground floor of a similar but complimentary initiative, you might want to check out the recently launched W3C POI Working Group.

From their charter:

The objective of the POI WG is to develop a Recommendation that defines a POI data format that allows digital content publishers to effectively describe and efficiently serve points of interest data.

That is, they’re working on describing exactly how points should be defined, and how they could be transmitted.

In other news…

There appeared to be lots of interesting stuff presented at the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality conference in Korea, and RMIT’s own Matthew Kwan has developed geoSMS: a standard for sending your location via SMS.

Next: a quick breather after conference paper submissions before starting on some interesting new work.

 

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