Re: What about Reverse Geocoding?

Richard,

We also have to worry about adoption.  We want interop between all UAs  
and the web.  There is a significant cost to reverse geolcoation and/ 
or Civic addresses.  For example, the base implementation of a UA and  
a GPS device has no understand of how to translate the location data  
from lat/lon to anything greater.  My concern is that if we push ahead  
and provide a civic address as a non-optional part of the Position  
element, you will effectively cut off the base UAs from participation  
in the geolocation enabled web.

For this reason, we pushed any non-lat-lon-location data until v.2

Doug

On Nov 11, 2008, at 1:09 PM, Richard Barnes wrote:

> Andrei,
>
> Discussion of how you populate a civic address field is completely  
> separate from the format of the field itself.  Just because we've  
> got a lat/long in the current version doesn't mean we have to say  
> how a location provider uses GPS, right?  The point of this API is  
> just to provide access to whatever location is there, not to specify  
> how to get it.  How the location gets there (into the browser) is up  
> to the location provider.
>
> If you're curious though, by and large civic location has to be  
> manually configured or reverse-geocoded.  The IETF networks at the  
> last few IETF meetings have been location-enabled, and we've  
> provided civic addresses (down to an individual room) corresponding  
> to the 802.11 AP that a client is connected to.  This is a good  
> example of a case where civic is a lot easier to use that geodetic  
> -- it would have been a huge pain to set up any sort of geodetic  
> positions for APs.
>
> As far as the syntax I was suggesting, I was imagining a compound  
> position object, for example:
> interface Position {
> 	readonly attribute Geodetic geodetic;
> 	readonly attribute Civic civic;
> 	readonly attribuet UsageRules rules
> }
> (This is what a Position looks like in the current HELD location  
> provider.)  A client would then get civic information like I showed  
> before, geodetic information with something like  
> "loc.geodetic.latitude", rules with something like  
> "loc.rules.retransmissionAllowed".
>
> Cheers,
> --Richard
>
>
> Andrei Popescu wrote:
>> On Tue, Nov 11, 2008 at 6:40 PM, Richard Barnes <rbarnes@bbn.com>  
>> wrote:
>>> I though the group had discussed "reverse geocoding", which, I  
>>> admit, is
>>> more complicated.  This is just defining a format.
>> I'm not sure why we'd define a new interface (i.e. 'Civic') if there
>> is no way to produce objects that implement it. Or if we do specify a
>> way to produce such objects (e.g. your example suggests adding a
>> 'civic' attribute to the Position interface) then I don't see how  
>> we'd
>> be able to completely separate the discussion from reverse geocoding.
>> I think the two should be discussed at the same time.
>> Andrei

Received on Tuesday, 11 November 2008 21:19:31 UTC