Re: Civic Address for V2

Hi Marc,

On Fri, Mar 6, 2009 at 8:51 AM, Marc Linsner <mlinsner@cisco.com> wrote:
> Andrei,
>
> You are (almost) correct in your analysis.  ;^)
>
> Prior to being comfortable, I would ask that you investigate the civic
> location addressing enabled in Microsoft products as to it's usage for
> worldwide location applications, ie. parcel delivery, public safety, etc.
>
> My basis for questioning is simply the variations that have been proposed to
> the IETF.  If folks have issues with the extensive pidf-lo, is the proposed
> simpler LO going to fit the bill?
>


That is a good question. In the case of parcel delivery I have yet to
see a form that requires me to fill in 19 different fields. I have
used quite a few Web sites for shipping stuff to various parts of the
world and, based on this limited experience, it seems like the format
we proposed would fit the bill. Are you thinking of a particular
counter-example?  As for public safety, I agree with Alec: it should
not be the main target for this API.

>
> So, Public Safety was forging ahead with the complete acceptance that their
> 'MSAG' location was different from human consumable civic locations.  They
> came to the IETF and asked for an object to carry their MSAG location.
> After examining the varying methods a host will discover and use it's
> location, carrying the MSAG object plus the human consumable object just
> makes no sense.  Hence, convergence.
>

Ok, perhaps convergence is the right path in case of the IETF spec and
for implementers of that spec. On the other hand, this is a Web API
that's meant to satisfy a different class of use cases, which are all
fine with a simpler format.

> So I wonder, do you believe that you can algorithmically 2-way transform
> pidf-lo objects to W3C location objects with 100% success, or are you asking
> hosts to carry around two different location objects?
>

I think it's fine to live with a 1-way transformation (from pidf-lo to
W3C) and accept the fact that the public safety use case may find our
simpler address format inadequate. If the API is extensible, we can
always add more fields if application developers complain.

Thanks,
Andrei

Received on Tuesday, 10 March 2009 03:22:17 UTC