- From: Richard Barnes <rbarnes@bbn.com>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 21:59:02 -0500
- To: Ian Hickson <ian@hixie.ch>
- CC: Greg Bolsinga <bolsinga@apple.com>, public-geolocation <public-geolocation@w3.org>
> As far as I can tell, of the use cases for geolocation given in the spec, > only the third ("Automatic form-filling") involves an address, and frankly > I'm not convinced that that is a realistic use case. Actually, civic addresses make sense for several of the use cases. Let's take a look: 1. Find points of interest in the user's area It certainly makes sense for me to use a civic address to find points of interest in my area. If I'm looking for the major tourist attractions in Darmstadt, why not say I'm in Darmstadt. This is especially important for things with explicit jurisdictions, like police departments (which is a point of interest in some cases!). The IETF even has some protocols for this that you can do in AJAX: <http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5222> <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-forte-ecrit-lost-extensions-00> 2. Annotating content with location information I don't see why using civic here makes any less sense than geo. After all, the major point of the flickr location look-up linked to earlier [1] was to translate a lat/long to a civic address. 3. Automatic form-filling Already discussed this one. 4. Show the user's position on a map This one comes the closest to being lat/long only, since that's ultimately how the map app is going to think. 5. Turn-by-turn route navigation I haven't looked at code for these things, but as far as I can tell from my interactions with Google Maps etc, mapping/navigation apps think in terms of streets, which are definitely a civic concept (cf. CAtype RD). 6. Alerts when points of interest are in the user's vicinity Depending on the granularity of the civic address, you can certainly do proximity checking (Same street, close number? Neighboring street?). See also number 1. 7. Up-to-date local information Civic addresses are in wide use here as well. Every weather site I've been to has been indexed on instead place names or ZIP codes, not lat/long. The US National Weather Service even prefers "City, State" to ZIP codes. See also number 1. 8. Location-tagged status updates in social networking applications Again, civic addresses work here, too. "Where are you?" "51st and Broadway". Granularity control can even be easier with civic location (a topic that GEOPRIV has worked on, see [2] and [3]). --Richard [1] <http://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-geolocation/2008Nov/0043.html> [2] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-geopriv-policy-17> [3] <http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-geopriv-policy-17#section-6.5.1>
Received on Friday, 14 November 2008 02:59:47 UTC