Re: Draft Charter

hello geolocation!

i have not yet introduced myself to this list, but now that i am 
posting, here is a brief intro: i have been working on various aspects 
of web technology for a long time, and for the last year, geolocation 
has become an increasingly important concept for me. one of my current 
research focuses is on the mobile web and geolocation.

at WWW2008 last april, i organized the "first international workshop on 
location and the web (LocWeb2008)". my goal was to attract papers from 
the intersection of web technologies and more traditional geo-oriented 
areas. while i think the workshop was a success, it definitely had an 
emphasis on the geo side and fewer web-related papers than i would have 
liked.

http://dret.typepad.com/dretblog/2008/05/locweb-2008-pro.html

that being said, i think it would be very good if the geolocation 
concepts in various pieces of web technology (the most important being 
HTTP, URI, HTML, and DOM) were aligned. if all these things are being 
developed in isolation, it is less likely that there is one geolocation 
concept that is reused in various technologies.

my hope was and still is that the W3C will recognize the need for a 
concerted effort among various pieces of web architecture to be 
augmented with geolocation features, and will develop geolocation 
concepts which can be reused in various contexts.

i do understand that this thinking is probably more top-down than 
bottom-up and may not appeal to everybody. but what i want to do is to 
point out that this would be a good moment in time to make a decision 
whether geolocation should be approached by the W3C as a strategic 
direction, or on a one-by-one basis.

> [1] http://www.w3.org/2008/06/geolocation/charter/

as i pointed out, i am new to this list and thus i don't know the 
history of this list and the planned working group. the charter as it is 
currently drafted is rather narrow, and that is by intent, i guess. i am 
curious to hear what others think about the scope of the charter (after 
all, it's the "geolocation working group" and not the "DOM location 
module" working group), and specifically, what people think about a more 
strategic approach to geolocation on the web.

kind regards,

erik wilde   tel:+1-510-6432253 - fax:+1-510-6425814
        dret@berkeley.edu  -  http://dret.net/netdret
        UC Berkeley - School of Information (ISchool)

Received on Friday, 20 June 2008 17:01:30 UTC