Re: WG Objectives - A Personal Take

On 27/10/2010 20:09, Raj Singh wrote:
> I made a page for the data model discussion:
> http://www.w3.org/2010/POI/wiki/Data_Model

Hello all,

Thanks Raj for writing this down, this gives us something to start a
discussion from. It seems you based your list primarily on Marco's
"smallest subset if information which can describe a POI" which in turn
was based on Gary's contributions. However, one thing Marco also
mentioned as being important was "extensibility"; I'd like to agree with
that and propose to make a significant change to the data model along
the following lines:

Replace "centroid" by a more flexible "anchor" (terminology subject to
discussion) property which describes where in the world the POI belongs.
This anchor property should have an attribute/subtype that specifies how
its data should be interpreted. A lat/lon/alt in WGS84 type anchor seems
to be a very obvious anchor type to define, but the following anchor
types come to mind as well:

- x,y locations on a 2D grid/ x,y,z locations on a 3D grid
Use case: situations where lat/lon/alt are impractical, such as in
buildings where dimensions are usually measured in meters. Much easier
and faster authoring

- fiducial markers or images
Use case: Augmented Reality experiences obviously, but could also be
applied to virtual worlds

- buildings
Use case: again, easier authoring than looking up lat/lon coordinates
for everything you want to describe. Also, it conveys a string
connection between the POI and the real-world entity that is being
described. This allows for smarter and nicer user interfaces; for
example see
http://www.perey.com/ARStandards/Nokia_A_Web_Services_Platform.pdf by
Nokia's Petros Belimpasakis et al for some functional AR examples of
tying POIs and buildings together, but the same usability holds for maps
and virtual worlds.

- dynamic entities
Use case: wouldn't it be neat to describe a car or person as POI? As
computer vision improves, computers can track and recognize more and
more of the world around us. The AR use case is again obvious, but what
if you could dsignate your favourite football player as a POI? Apply
some CSS-like "outer-glow: 3pt yellow;" effect to your POI, link it to
the WebTV stream you're watching and you'll never lose track of him again.


So the last example is a bit futuristic and probably won't be part of
the first spec but I hope it conveys why I think having a flexible (and
extensible) "anchor" property would be better than hardcoding a centroid
for each point. All the other properties that have been written down
(except perhaps address) are useful for any of these use cases which is
why I would really like this flexibility in the spec.

Looking forward to your opinions!


Best regards,

Jens

Also, this list is not exhaustive and I welcome other suggestions as well.

Received on Thursday, 28 October 2010 12:47:13 UTC