Location Determination vs. Location Conveyance

I¹ve been somewhat confused by some threads of late that have talked about
the decision around how to make use of multiple location providers.
Admittedly, I¹m not a coder, which I¹m assuming leads to the majority of my
confusion.  But I¹m really wondering how this API is going to deal with the
multitude of hosts, OSs, location determination mechanisms, etc.  I¹ve long
thought the host OS would provide location to applications via an API and
would be up to the host OS to interface with the various location providers..
Granted, a host OS may indeed present multiple locations to an application,
but in turn the host OS may make the decision as to which *one* location to
present when multiples are available.

In my mind, location determination will be 1 of 3 methods (or multiples):
self-measured (GPS/Galileo), network provided, or user input.  It would be
up to the host OS/user to decide which of them (or multiples) to present to
applications.  I can¹t imagine the API defined by this group talking
directly to the location determination mechanism(s).

What am I missing?

Thanks,

-Marc-
------ End of Forwarded Message