Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

The Russian government is reviving its Soviet-era project to create a navigation system that completes with the US GPS.

Three sputniks of the global GLONASS navigation system were successfully put into a pre-calculated orbit on Wednesday [26 December 2007].

The GLONASS system was put into operation for the Russian Defence Ministry in September 1993. It had a limited number of twelve sputniks. The system creates a continuous navigation signals space, allowing the most accurately determination of the coordinates and speed of seagoing vessels, air, land and other vehicles, provided with system receivers.

The orbital group was increased to the initially planned number of 24 sputniks in December 1995. However, due to shortage of finances, it was again reduced to a limited proportion. The GLONASS was declared as a dual-purpose system by the president’s order of February 18, 1999. President Putin instructed Roskosmos and the Defence Ministry in December 2005 to accelerate their work to restore the orbital group of the GLONASS system in order to make it even more applicable on the entire territory of Russia by the beginning of 2008 and to turn it into a global system by the end of 2009…

According to Engadget, we should expect to see the first compatible consumer device in mid-2008. By 2010, Russia will open the system up to the outside nations as well.

Given the growing importance of location-based systems in the future, governments around the world are trying to create systems to either compete or complement with the widely used GPS system — the EU develops the Galileo system, China pushes for the Beidou navigation system, and Russia builds GLONASS.

In a market-driven economy, competitions are usually for the consumers. But, I’m uncertain about the development of multiple navigation systems with isolated technology solutions. There is no doubt that governments pushing for their own systems are in the best interest of their national security and national pride. But, I’m worried that multiple incompatible systems will only create confusions in commercial product developments and hinder the speedy development of location-based technology.

According to BusinessWeek, AOL is offering users a new instant messaging capability that allows them to see the physical location of their buddies. Currently this new location-aware feature is available only to IM clients on desktop or laptop computers. Supports for cellphones are coming soon.

Central to this new feature is a plug-in called Skyhook. It doesn’t rely on GPS to provide location data, but rather it uses Wi-Fi signals.

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A question that most parents with teenage children often ask is “where are you?”. To help to answer this question, wireless service providers begin to offer location-based services that allow parents to monitor the whereabouts of their children on home computers.

To determine the location of a cellphone user, a service makes use of wireless signals from the cellphone. Based on the cellphone’ signal strength, the service is able to compute the relative position of the user from a group of cell towers. Knowing the geographical location of the user’s cellphone (i.e., a latitude/longitude value pair), the service then perform “reverse geocoding” to determine the location of the user.

In theory, the service works. In practice, however, there is a problem that was quite unexpected. Here is the problem:
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GPS is one of the hottest technology in the 2007 International Consumer Electronics Show (CES). Recent news are full with exciting GPS product and service reviews. If 2006 was the year of Wi-Fi, then 2007 will be the year of GPS.

Here are few CES stories in the development.
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Blutooth MediaServer is a location-based system that distributes advertising via Bluetooth. Access Points of the Bluetooth MediaServer are typically placed in high-traffic locations such as restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls. Upon entering the vicinity of these Access Points, customers who carry active Bluetooth devices (e.g., cellphones and PDA) will automatically receive targeted advertising messages.

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GeoTicTacToe is not a typical location-based game. It’s an attempt to turn a classic 2-D board game into a sportive physical exercise.

In GeoTicTacToe, a predefined geographical area is mapped onto a virtual 3×3 square. Players, equipped with GPS and mobile devices, are expected to travel to the square locations and place their marks (i.e. X or O). Unlike in the classic Tic-Tac-Toe, in GeoTicTacToe players are not required to take turn to place their marks. In other words, players who can run faster may more marks than the others, and thus, increased their chances to win.

This may seem to be a unfair rule. However, according to Christoph Schlieder and his colleagues, this unfairness, and coupled with other spatial configurations, creates new opportunities for location-based game designs.

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In most mobile applications, GPS phones are typically used to track the physical location of their users. iPointer is an interesting location-based service that uses GPS phones as “pointers” for identifying physical things that surround their users — e.g., landmarks, buildings, and point of interests.

This is how I think it works.

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On the way home yesterday I was thinking about useful location-based services (LBS). In particular, I was imagining the kind of LBS that would be useful to the everyday mobile phone users.

Here is a list of imaginary LBS that came to my mind:
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