Re: Geolocation and POI

On Fri, Jul 9, 2010 at 6:11 PM, Christine Perey <cperey@perey.com> wrote:
> Hello Lars Erik,
>
> Thank you for your invitation to inputs on this topic.
>
> As you may realize, AR POI involves location and device orientation as *two*
> of the many possible types of metadata attributed to a point of interest.
>
> The "point" can and will very frequently, be an object (thing or a person)
>  moving in space/without geoposition or orientation associated. Even if the
> GEO WG charter were to include feature extraction attributes, I fear that
> the AR community could have difficulty "seeing" the definition of POI as
> their domain for contribution if it is "housed" in the GEO WG.

To offer a balancing viewpoint, in my experience the AR community are
very well aware that their 'technology' is a hybrid composed from a
wide range of standards and potential standards. It's also common to
find 'the map is not the territory' observations amongst AR
technologists. If a restaurant or a house for sale pops up in 3D AR
view, AR people are plenty smart enough to know that it is *not* their
core business to enumerate properties like 'housePrice' or 'vegan?',
even if that kind of information will ultimately prove critical to
their applications. AR, as the name suggests is a bridging technology;
many kinds of description and identification will be used, from
barcodes, NFC, face and audio recognition, ... Some of these will be
standardised elsewhere, perhaps some at W3C, and others will be
value-adding facilities associated with particular apps. The whole
system will evolve over time. Frankly, if "the AR community" are
unable to find a way to contribute to POI efforts just because they're
in a GEO WG rather than an AR WG, that should be a huge alarm bell for
anyone at W3C considering chartering a group for them. I'm much more
optimistic though...

> My major concerns are that
>
> (1) the AR work will be lost (not receive the attention it warrants) if it
> is part of the Geo location group.

I think you underestimate the intelligence of the AR community here.

> If the GEO WG scope/charter encompasses all the possible AR activity, these
> will gradually become "charter" creep.

"All possible AR activity" includes describing opening hours of
restaurants, face recognition, barcodes in all their flavours, audio
fingerprinting, category systems, movie lookups, voice (hands free)
browsing, ... ... pretty much anything. AR is open-ended by definition
(the "reality" bit). The idea that W3C might try to stuff all such
activities into a GEO WG is ... unconvincing.  Nobody at all is
proposing this!

> (2) people who originally chartered the GEO WG are not the best to be
> implementing/writing the recommendations which need to be implemented by the
> AR platform publishers.

Which people are you talking about? why do you expect the initial
drafters of the Geo charter to be the only contributors to future
work?

> My proposal is that there be two separate WGs within W3C and that these have
> close working relationships and perhaps co-locate a meeting per year, as
> needed/ convenient.

I'd suggest a single GEO WG take on the task of describing basic POIs,
and that its charter require Web-style extensibility that will allow
multiple other parties to extend those descriptions in unbounded ways.
I suggest W3C also charters some AR Interest Group whose role would be
to broker standards-related  collaborations amongst the many different
technical aspects that make up the AR application landscape.

The money and time saved from not having 2 groups working on the same
thing can be re-allocated to other liaison activities (assuming that
the money/time exist in the first place).

> A separate WG will permit the charter to treat AR is a "mash up" of many
> technologies. An AR WG will have the ability to establish liaisons with many
> groups which includes Geo WG but others which are outside the scope of
> interest of a GEO WG.

AR is indeed a combination of many technologies! An AR IG could as you
suggest establish many liaisons with related groups.

cheers,

Dan

Received on Friday, 9 July 2010 16:35:28 UTC