- From: Peter Rushforth via GitHub <sysbot+gh@w3.org>
- Date: Mon, 19 Jul 2021 14:15:34 +0000
- To: public-sdwig@w3.org
In the [minutes](https://www.w3.org/2021/05/27-sdw-minutes.html), I noted that the Web platform has no native representation of location, and so geofences can't be natively represented. Geofences seem (to me) to be a modern way of expressing a feature geometry, together with a desired application behaviour, perhaps based on [spatial criteria](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DE-9IM). What is really interesting about geofencing on the Web is that they point to a capability of the Web platform that has yet to be standardized, which is, support for **maps** and **location**. "Wait a minute", you say, "nobody said anything about maps." Hear me out. In MapML, we have specified the [`<feature>`](https://maps4html.org/MapML/spec/#the-feature-element-0) element, which has defined characteristics based on requirements inferred from existing practice and "new" ideas, in particular, ideas from the accessibility community, as I [reported](https://www.w3.org/community/maps4html/2021/05/27/winter-2021-report/) last meeting. Having a notification of a location-related event is a fundamental value for location information. I believe it is fundamental for the Web platform to support for the blind and other forms of disability, and so we think it is definitely in-scope for evaluation and implementation in MapML. Whereas a sighted user could look at a **map** and (+/- easily) say "Yep, I'm within that polygon", or "Yep, I'm near that gas station", a blind user or even an autonomous user agent would need to be able to do that processing and render the result as spoken text, or some other signal. There is a specification effort in the W3C / WICG, called the [geolocation-sensor API](https://www.w3.org/TR/geolocation-sensor/), which intends to modernize the existing geolocation API. One of the BIG requests for the geolocation-sensor API is [to support geofencing capabilities](https://github.com/w3c/geolocation-sensor/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+geofenc). It seems that support for geofencing is [currently blocked on privacy considerations](https://github.com/w3c/geolocation-sensor/issues/22#issuecomment-439015361): allowing a web site to track the user agent 'in the background' means that web sites can / will surveil users' location, even without being in the foreground. How to bring this concept to the platform **without compromising** the privacy of the user and enabling big-brother background location surveillance? If the [browser](url) itself had a concept of **maps and location**, as suggested by MapML, the browser (not the web site) could do the geospatial processing (in the background) for a set of features identified in advance, and yield the **accessible** result (a notification) when the geospatial criteria are met, **without** the server receiving the user's location in the background. -- GitHub Notification of comment by prushforth Please view or discuss this issue at https://github.com/w3c/sdw/issues/1268#issuecomment-882584943 using your GitHub account -- Sent via github-notify-ml as configured in https://github.com/w3c/github-notify-ml-config
Received on Monday, 19 July 2021 14:15:36 UTC