New attribute suggestion

Dear Geolocation WG members,

Hello everybody.
I've heard about this WG a few days ago, and briefly read the editor's draft.
And I'd like to suggest to discuss about position logging. 
In accordance with position acquirement, can we log the acquired current 
position into a repository? A repository can be a local file in a portable
device
or it can be a remote server. 
If we extend the Gelocation API to log one's position, it can support many
useful
use cases and help application developers work easy. 
Here is our proposal for extending the current Geolocation API draft, if it's
still open.

[ Location Logging ]
We think Geolocation API would be much better when it adopts logging facility.
(i.e. It's different from caching one's position.) The use cases for this
feature are 
as below.

- Preventing the emergency situation
Let's assume that a person is climbing a mountain on a weekend. A portable
device 
which he carries in his bag or pocket traces the location of himself by using
the local GPS
or broadband network. If he enters into a dangerous area where he may lose his
way,
the device warns him that it's not safe to go further in that direction. In
addition, 
his position is periodically recorded to the local device storage or delivered
to a remote
rescue server if he had configured the automatic logging. In this case, the
device plays 
as a personal black-box, which can be used to rescue him in an emergency 
if his position is periodically delivered to a remote rescue server.
Furthermore, he can upload
his trace to his own blog while recommending his pleasant journey to his
friends. 

- Asking emergency aid
Let's assume that a person is entering an area where crime is rife in a dark
rainy night.
The portable device notifies him of such dangerous situation. But, he decides to
go on 
since he is in a hurry for appointment. He turns on the soft-911 mode of his
device to verify 
the location of the nearest police man and to let the policeman know his
location for 
provision against emergencies. In case of emergency, he can easily manage the
situation
by sending the request for emergency aid to the nearest policeman who has been
tracking
his position. The track under the soft-911 mode is temporarily stored to a
remote 911 server
until he turns off the mode. 

For above use cases, it's necessary to store one's position for a while, and we
need 
additional functionalities besides those in editor's draft. The required
features are as below.
-       Whether to log : boolean flag (True/False)
-       Where to log : log repository (URL)
-       When to log : logging frequency (TimeInterval)
Obviously, these features can be handled by application, but it's too
complicated to control
logging without these features. We think that our proposal would raise new kind
of web service
and proliferate storage backend of cloud-computing.

interface PositionOptions {
attribute boolean enableLog;       /* added */
attribute string    loggingURL;     /* added */
attribute long     interval;          /* added */
attribute boolean enableHighAccuracy;
attribute long     timeout;
attribute long     maximumAge;
};

Thanks for reading.

With regards,
Moon-Sang Lee & Min-Soo Koo

Received on Tuesday, 2 December 2008 09:41:04 UTC