Re: Location Determination vs. Location Conveyance

Hi Marc,

On Tue, Jan 27, 2009 at 9:22 PM, Marc Linsner <mlinsner@cisco.com> wrote:
> I’ve been somewhat confused by some threads of late that have talked about
> the decision around how to make use of multiple location providers.
>  Admittedly, I’m not a coder, which I’m assuming leads to the majority of my
> confusion.  But I’m really wondering how this API is going to deal with the
> multitude of hosts, OSs, location determination mechanisms, etc.  I’ve 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 can’t imagine the API defined by this group talking
> directly to the location determination mechanism(s).
>
> What am I missing?
>

I don't think you're missing anything. If I understand you right,
you're saying that the API implementation may not even 'see' the
individual location providers, which are all hidden by the underlying
OS. And it's up to the OS to arbitrate between the various location
providers and return one location to the application (e.g. a UA that
implements Geolocation API in this case).

While this is certainly true on some platforms, it isn't the case on
others so it is an implementation detail that a UA would have to deal
with on each OS it wants to support.

Thanks,
Andrei

Received on Wednesday, 28 January 2009 13:24:35 UTC