Firstly there’s the UK audience at GeoCommunity, the Association For Geographic Information’s annual get-together and all round geo shindig. GeoCommunity is probably the closest the UK has to California’s Where 2.0, but with a very different audience and a very different accent. The AGI still draws the bulk of its membership from the GIS heartlands of the GI community, although in recent years the association has dramatically expanded its reach into the web, mobile and neogeography domains.

The Location Business Summit, on the other hand is firstly in San Jose in the heart of Silicon Valley and secondly has a very pronounced American accent and draws the bulk of the audience from the Bay Area where web and mobile, both from a developer and from a business perspective, hold sway.

One deck, two audiences.

The slide deck is above, plus there’s a PDF version with the talk notes.

As previously mentioned, the GeoCommunity audience hails, in the main, from the GIS heartland. A talk which deals with context, with search, with relevance, with LBS and with maps and mobile got a great reaction and fitted well with the other closing keynote from the British Library’s Kimberley Kowal who put together a gorgeous deck full of beautiful maps, ancient, old and not so old. Steven Feldman has put together a list of these cartographical wonders, if you’re interested. Following up old maps with new, digital maps seemed to be a good segue and bridge between printed maps and digital maps. After the talk, people came up to me and said nice words and overall, the reaction seemed to be that this was an area of geo and location that didn’t normally appear on their professional radar. That’s a sweeping generalisation of course but it was also immensely gratifying.

Fast forward to today; not in the UK but slap bang in the middle of San Jose. Same talk. Same deck. Same sentiments. But a vastly different, though equally good, reaction from the audience. This time the questions and comments focused not on the map, not on LBS but on what the next major step in sensors would be after GPS and on what sources of data LB(M)S needs and lacks.

One deck, two audiences. Even in the same industry, albeit the vague and nebulously fuzzy grouping that we call the location industry, two very different audiences can give two very different reactions. One day, reaction will probably be the same, but today, geo and location really is a very broad church indeed.

Firstly, let’s get the conspiracy theory out of the way; this theory has been presented in a variety of ways but all of them seem to think that your iOS device is tracking your location and that the reason for this is some shadowy request from government or intelligence agencies. Perhaps the most eloquent case for this was on Frank Reiger’s blog.

Now I love a good conspiracy theory as much as the next person and Frank’s blog post was a great read. But I have to take issue with the two main points he raises. Firstly there’s “if it was a bug then it would have been fixed … it hasn’t been fixed so it can’t be a bug and must therefore be deliberate“. Secondly there’s “not only has the bug not been fixed but the file even moved location without being fixed so it must be (even more) deliberate“.

I’ve worked in the software industry for almost 25 years, many of those cutting code, and can say with hand on heart that bugs, oddities and plain wrong behaviour stay in code bases not because they don’t need to be fixed but because other factors push them down in the priority list, factors such as hard release dates, new features taking precedence and the ill defined side effects of complex software systems not being able to be fully QA’d. Just because a bug or an unforeseen side effect remains in a production code base does not make a conspiracy theory of government or intelligence agency intervention.

We also live in a world of distributed software development teams. It’s enough of a challenge to keep teams in different floors of the same building in synch; it’s even more difficult when language, time zones and different countries get into the mix. Just because the consolidated.db cache moved location again, does not make a conspiracy theory.

So all in all, nice post, great conspiracy theory but, sadly, very little to back up the assertions.

But if your iOS device is tracking or caching your location, why is the data so inaccurate in places, showing places you’re pretty sure you haven’t been or have visited only fleetingly, yet not showing places you’d think would show up, such as where you live or work?

For the answer to these questions, I’d recommend a thorough reading of Peter Batty’s excellent three posts on the topic, which actually digs into the data that is present on iOS devices, rather than making shrill conspiracy theories based on other, equally shrill, media headlines.

Peter’s posts, “So actually, Apple isn’t recording your (accurate) iPhone location“, “More on Apple recording your iPhone location history” and “The scoop: Apple’s iPhone is NOT storing your accurate location and NOT storing history” go into great detail about what the consolidated.db location data cache does contain and, more importantly, what it doesn’t.

An anonymous comment on one of Peter’s posts points to a document submitted by Apple to US Congress in July 2010, which includes the following

When a customer requests current location information … Apple will retrieve known locations for nearby cell towers and Wi-Fi access points from its proprietary database and transmit the data back to the device … The device uses the information, along with GPS coordinates (if available), to determine its actual location. Information about the device’s location is not transmitted to Apple, Skyhook or Google. Nor is it transmitted to any third-party application provider, unless the customer expressly consents

Another comment from Jude on one of Peter’s posts makes this observation …

My Guess?

It’s not a list of cell phone locations that you’ve been to, but the opposite, a list of cell phone locations near you downloaded to the iPhone from Apple in case you move into range of one of them. i.e. At a guess what is happening is location services identifies a cell tower and asks for its location, and is replied to with the list of locations that contains that cell tower, that list is then cached so that it does not need to be requested again.

Of course, this is only a guess based on the wide range of addresses people are seeing and how its near to, but not exactly where, the people have traveled.

So rather than iOS actively and accurately tracking you and reporting this information to some, unspecified, intelligence agency it’s actually the complete opposite; your device is actively downloading the next cell tower and, in some cases, wifi information that is near you and where you might be going to provide a better location experience. Which explains the inaccuracy of the locations people have been seeing in their version of the cache data and explains why there’s some places they haven’t been showing up in the data and why places they have been aren’t showing up.

Of course, this information still has personal value and should really be secured by iOS and not by an individual having to secure their handset and encrypt their backups but if anyone still thinks they see the black helicopters circling, it looks more and more unlikely and, as Ed Parsons pointed out, a smartphone without location just isn’t … smart.

I’m not the only one to question the media coverage and the conclusions the media presents. Longtime Apple commentator and author Andy Ihnatko neatly sums the entire topic up thus

A few reality checks, lest I inadvertently do a Glenn Beck number on all of you, here:

• This database isn’t storing GPS data. It’s just making a rough location fix based on nearby cell towers. The database can’t reveal where you were…only that you were in a certain vicinity. Sometimes it’s miles and miles off. This implies that the logfile’s purpose is to track the performance of the phone and the network, and not the movements of the user.
• A third party couldn’t get access to this file without physical access to your computer or your iPhone. Not unless you’ve jailbroken your iPhone and didn’t bother resetting its remote-access password…or there’s an unpatched exploit that would give Random Person On The Internet root access to your phone.
• It’s pretty much a non-issue if you’ve clicked the “Encrypt iPhone Backup” option in iTunes. Even with physical access to your desktop, a no-goodnik wouldn’t be able to access the logfile.

But still! What a nervous can of worms. This is an open, unlocked file in a known location in a standard database format that anybody can read. If someone has physical access to your Mac — or remote access to your user account — it’s a simple matter of copying a file and opening it. And while the logfile can’t tell someone that you were at a specific house, it can obviously tell your boss that you went to the Cape on the day you called in sick.

And it’s not as though Apple and these two developers are the only people who know that this file exists and that it’s so easy to access. By the time the Good Guys blow the whistle, the Bad Guys have had it for months. Lord only knows what they’ve been doing with this information.

It’s also, frankly, another reason why I value my iPhone’s “remote nuke” feature and wish it were possible to nuke all data directly from the handset. I can’t think of any circumstance under which my location data would possibly be damaging, incriminating, or even just embarrassing. That’s not the point: if I can’t control the data that my phone is collecting, I should at least have the power to destroy it utterly.

Another well known Apple commentator, John Gruber also comments that

The big question, of course, is why Apple is storing this information. I don’t have a definitive answer, but the best at least somewhat-informed theory I’ve heard is that consolidated.db acts as a cache for location data, and that historical data should be getting culled but isn’t, either due to a bug or, more likely, an oversight. I.e. someone wrote the code to cache location data but never wrote code to cull non-recent entries from the cache, so that a database that’s meant to serve as a cache of your recent location data is instead a persistent log of your location history. I’d wager this gets fixed in the next iOS update.

In my previous post I wrote that “caching is a common technique used to speed up network systems and it’s not surprising, at least to me, that iOS is using caching techniques” and it turns out that iOS is not alone and that, unsurprisingly, Google’s Android is doing pretty much the same thing, caching cell tower and wifi location information, again presumably for the purposes of speeding up the location systems on Android mobile devices. The one difference between the iOS and Android approach is that Android overwrites the cache data when the cache file fills up whereas iOS doesn’t. Rather than a dark location tracking conspiracy this looks more like a bug or an oversight on the part of iOS and as John Gruber notes, this will probably be fixed in an upcoming release of Apple’s mobile operating system. I would also hope that the visibility of this cache data on Android will also be secured too, and soon.

Taking a step back for a moment, caching of any information to reduce the need to make time costly network calls seems to be mobile’s Kobayashi Maru … you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t. If you do cache information which is perceived, rightly or wrongly, to be sensitive then media outrage will result. If you don’t cache such information, then a mobile device will be reliant on network access every time the un-cached information is needed and that mobile device will be perceived as being “too slow“.

Probably the only way to prevent a recurrence of this sort of media event is for more transparency on how such information is being stored and used and, as John Abbott pointed out on my previous post, the provision of a setting which says “Switch this setting on for a super-quick location fix, we’ll keep your location private“.

As is so often the case, this is much less about the technical side of the issue and much more about what Ihnatko calls the “Ick Factor” … about how the public, led by the media, sees things.

iPhone tracks users’ movements … says the BBC

iPhone keeps record of everywhere you go … says the Guardian

Got an iPhone or 3G iPad? Apple is recording your moves …. says O’Reilly Radar

iOS devices secretly log and retain record of every place you go … says BoingBoing

… and when I use the word “says” in reality “screams” would be more accurate.

But as is often the case, the headlines don’t tell the whole story. At Where 2.0 two security researchers have discovered a cache file in iOS which contains cell tower ids and corresponding longitude and latitude coordinates. This cache file isn’t accessible if your iOS device has a passcode lock enabled, which it should be, and while it is backed up to any computer you synch your iOS device with, if your backups are encrypted, which they should be, this cache file isn’t accessible is anyone, especially not “a jealous spouse or private detective” as the researchers claim.

So why is your iOS device caching your cell tower ids and their locations? A reasonable supposition would be to speed up the A-GPS subsystem in your device, so that time consuming network calls don’t always need to be made and so your iOS device seems to be faster. Caching is a common technique used to speed up network systems and it’s not surprising, at least to me, that iOS is using caching techniques.

So if you’re an iOS user, should you be worried? It’s true that the iTunes terms of service does say that “We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising” but there’s currently no evidence that location information is actually being sent to Apple as a result of this caching. That’s not to say that it isn’t or that it won’t be in the future, but for now, it looks unlikely. Take some basic security precautions such as a phone passcode lock and encrypt your synchronised backups and this looks less like a gross invasion of privacy and much more like any other use of caching techniques.

I think it’s right and good that researchers are probing into the the depths of a popular mobile operating system and looking for vulnerabilities. Your location, regardless of whether it’s your current position or where you’ve been is valuable and above all private information and is ripe for abuse as last year’s news on how free Android apps are sharing people’s location without their knowledge shows. But I take issue with the conclusions drawn from such research as this and how it’s being publicised. To put this in context, consider the following, totally imaginary on my part, media headlines about caching …

Your web browser records every web page you visit!

Well yes, but … without this your browser would far less usable and far slower and caching is a fundamental part of how the web works.

Your Internet Service Provider stores copies of every email you send and receive!

Well yes, but … it’s part of the IMAP protocol that most email accounts use today.

Your mobile phone provider tracks your mobile phone’s location!

Well yes, but … it’s the way that cellular networks work. It’s how you can make and receive calls. Disable this and mobile networks stop working.

Finally I’m reminded of the other, media fueled furores, that have appeared and subsequently disappeared, around the launch of Google’s Latitude and Facebook’s Places. Much media coverage ensued, many sensationalistic headlines, much wringing of hands from industry pundits and then the rest of the world got on with using location technologies and didn’t give it a second thought … until the next time the media wants some headline attentions.

A Sense Of Place

It’s going to be mobile’s year.

In fact, it has been “mobile’s year” for many years. Analysts have predicted that the following year will be the golden year of mobile, ever since WAP started to become generally available on small, monochrome screens.

This year, it might just be mobile’s year. Widespread adoption of geolocation, tablet computing and apps are transforming mobile from simply a mobile telephony handset, to truly mobile, experiential, computing.

The handset vendor that has been part of “mobile’s year” ever since the early days of such predictions, is Nokia. The journey from small, blue phones with Snake to technologically complex, Ovi-enabled devices has been fast and, at times, tough. Leading this continued evolution from the point of view of location, is Gary Gale.

Gale, as Director of Ovi Places, is continuing a life-long fascination with maps. From a deep fascination with Harry Beck’s Tube map as a child, he now runs a business which aims to meet – and exceed – the consumer expectations of what mapping can offer to mobility. These expectations are both, from the consumer’s perspective, urgent and complex.

Currently, location is often externalised, as demonstrated by the “world of check-ins” offered by Foursquare, Facebook Places, and elsewhere. Gale feels that location will simply bed into a wider context over time, leading to less specifically location-based applications, but more apps with location features. “The applications that we have, will do a much better job at predicting the information that we need, and delivering it – so it becomes less of a case of ‘app fatigue’. Currently, if you want to find a piece of information, you go to one app. It shows where the information you want to find is, so you swap over to another app, but then you realise that you’ve forgotten the time that the place you want to go to opens, so you have to go back to the previous app to find out. You then go back to the map app, and you find that it has lost the context, so you have to go through it again. It’s an immensely boring experience. Combining those pieces of information into something of use, is the challenge.”

“Industry commentators have been excited about the number of apps downloaded through app stores. It’s a nice infographic, but how many of them are usable? How many of them are used and reused on a daily basis? The challenge is less about the 30 billion mark; it’s much more about making my life easier.”

While Gale acknowledges that location is important – it’s rich, timely, and vital – but the important piece to remember here it is context. Gale’s view, which might challenge some current startups, is that as location does not fundamentally make an app in itself, it should also not be a rationale for a business.

Smartphones continue to occupy a minority share of overall mobile ownership, although this is growing quickly. As more and more consumers exchange their old handsets for sophisticated, GPS-enabled devices, the way in which we understand and use geo-locative data will change. We are still scratching the surface.

“Despite the meteoric rise of the check-in economy, a lot of people are very uncomfortable with the concept of sharing their current location with a company. I don’t think that’s an unreasonable premise, as a lot of the ways in which this is messaged, is ambiguous and unclear. My fear is that there will be a big tabloid media crash involving this technology; all of a sudden, this is brought to the public, and they will sit up and take notice. In a high-profile divorce between B-list celebrities, if one claims that they weren’t somewhere and the app says that they were, then the press would have a field day. It would be thrust into the public’s attention. The challenge for the location industry as a whole, is to make sure that that doesn’t happen.”

Gale points out the undercurrent of apps that, without the consumer knowing it, sends their location data back. While such references are often buried in a terms and conditions page that we all have the tendency to ignore until clicking Accept, the point is made that location information sharing is still oblique, with an insufficient level of clarity and understanding on the part of consumers.

This mismatch of delivery and experience extends to geotargeted advertising. As Gale’s history includes leading Yahoo’s UK Geotechnologies group – which developed the world’s first geotargeted advertising network. However, as he illustrates, geotargeting means, and results in, different outcomes in different environments. Different countries treat IP addresses in very different ways; regional IP allocation based on the Baby Bell network allows for reasonably precise targeting in the US, where many European countries make targeting more difficult, due to dynamic allocation. Such variations, and their impact on message delivery, are lessened with a greater degree of location information – although not without its dangers. “You have a trinity of mobile phone triangulation, GPS lock, and public wi-fi points, for information. They’re pretty accurate. Even without GPS, when someone is running a map application on an iPad even without GPS, just through just public wi-fi, you’re able to work out where you are. The key is to engage the customer, so that they think it’s a really handy feature, rather than “that’s creepy, how the hell did they know that?” – and that’s a big challenge.”

“People are happy with ads on mobile and the web, as they either consciously or unconsciously understand that there isn’t such a thing as a free lunch. What they’re less comfortable with, is the perception that there is someone watching them at that precise minute in time. That’s not the case; with the vast majority of information, apart from that which you sign on and participate in things, is utterly anonymised. You are just one point in a mass from which you can draw trends and plot nice graphs. There is a perception of ‘hell, how did I know that?’ and that’s very scary.”

More Than The Map

The other side of this coin, in terms of experience, is the quality of the information being presented. If your location can be pinpointed, then it means nothing unless there is good information – a good context to surround it. Gale makes the point that we are now at the point where it’s commonplace to use a GPS-enabled smartphone to find your way around a new place, where previously it used to be an A-Z, and latterly printouts of online maps. Neither are really seen in public any more, resulting in an expectation of not only “the now”, but “the what” and “why”. “We have had to go from the static, updated-twice-a-year view of the world, to a view where people have come to expect that the map which they are experiencing, is accurate, all of the time. If there’s a new housing development, footpath or a closed road, they get quite frustrated if they can see it with their own eyes, but the map doesn’t show that. There’s a fundamental change in the way in which we undertake mapping as a professional discipline.”

“The map’s not enough any more. You want a rich experience on the map, to avoid this disjointed app experience from earlier. You want the information represented on the map, to be available to you in a very easy-to-consume form which gives you the key facts that you need, and also to have it updated and be relevant. If you are looking for a place to get a cup of coffee, you want to know where those places are; you then need to know what time it opens; whether it serves food; whether there are nearby transport facilities. We expect that experience, no matter where we are. It’s a global marketplace, but everywhere in the world is local to somebody. It could be your local neighbourhood, or having got off the plane in a new city, you want to find somewhere to go out.”

“You expect that information to be made available in the same level of timeliness and freshness and accuracy as we do in your own local neighbourhood. That’s a significant swing from the two-editions-a-year, to a new place which has just opened up, and it should be on the map on my handset.”

Behind all of this, is place. “The spatial map still remains one of the best ways of visualising information. It’s visceral, visual, and the best way to impart this information. The map is not going anywhere, other than forward. People have predicted the death of the map, but it’s still the best way of representing that data.”

The point is strongly made that “hard data” – such a full address – is no longer enough, in terms of how to present location information. Our interaction with maps is similar to the historical use of search engines: based on hard syntax. “You have to know about informal places; you have to know about colloquial neighbourhoods, which don’t formally exist, but everyone knows where they are – like in London. Soho, Chinatown, the West End… are all ambiguously and vaguely defined, but everyone knows where they are. And you have to be able to understand that. But you also have to be able to understand in the same number of languages that there are in the world. People expect these services to respond to them in their mother tongue. You have to build internationalisation and localisation in, from the ground up. That’s a massive challenge for the industry. There’s still work to be done.”

As we finish, Gale makes the point that capability still needs information. While the UK and many other developed – and developing – countries have an abundance of mapping data to offer, this is not necessarily the case for every country. Essentially, this is about a quality, consistent experience – and for app developers, geotargeting-based businesses, and mapping agencies, to listen to consumers that pick holes in it. “They have the right to say that they were on location, and the experience was appalling. That will act as a significant nudge, in the direction of making the ability to have a complete map from different sources. People are coming to the conclusion that there needs to be a bit more sanity in this.”

Gary Gale is Director of Ovi Places at Nokia. Gary blogs at garygale.com, and he is @vicchi on Twitter.

Welcome to the world of the geo data silo: where closed data is open and open data is closed – Gary Gale (Nokia)

Inspired by London Transport maps, various historical maps and his son, Gary has been involved with maps and mapping for many years. His entertaining, informative and well-illustrated lecture took delegates on a short trip along the route taken by location-based communications from smoke signals, pigeons, the compass, maps such as the Mappa Mundi, radio signals and triangulation through to today’s maps as seen in smart phone with GPS-based mobile devices. He then turned his attention to data, silos of data and the “geo-industry” where the map doesn’t seem to be important any more; it’s all about the data and the map is often strangely absent.

Gary then took delegates on another trip, this time into the dark world of ‘Geo-Babel’, where we have data, lots of data, wide and varied, some commercial (Navteq and Teleatlas), some authoritative (Britain’s Ordnance Survey) and some of it crowd- sourced and growing aggressively (OpenStreetMap), some from unlikely sources (Flickr) and some from location-based social networking services (Foursquare and Gowalla). All this data, often available and free, a cartographer’s dream, but wait, Gary explains that there is now a darker side to data. Much of this ‘free’ data appears to be locked in its own private little data silos, ironically at a time when previously proprietary data becomes unlocked and open (Ordnance Survey), crowd-sourced data becomes locked behind a well meaning but restrictive license, the question is posed to delegates, how can we, as part of the geo-industry, dig ourselves out of this hole?

Mike Shand

Panel discussion: “All this data is good but what about the cartography?”

The last session of the conference was setup as a panel discussion, with the theme of “All this data is good, but what about the cartography?” In order to start the ball rolling the preceding presentation was by Gary Gale (Nokia/Ovi Maps). His grandly entitled presentation – Welcome to the world of the geo data silo; where closed data is open and open data is closed – certainly resonated with me, particularly “the four horsemen of the geopocalypse”. Gary sat aside to allow his fellow panelists a short rant-space each. Richard Fairhurst concentrated on his vision of carto-goodness. He made an interesting analogy between industrial carto (Google), Boing Boing carto (retro 8-bit games style map) and Artisan carto (cartography with care). For a laugh (I presume!) he proposed a figurehead for web cartography and then flipped up a slide with three figureheads – Jobs, Gates and Chilton. He was followed by Bob Barr with a wider view of maps and quality. I then tried to propose some questions to the panel (eg: you have shown examples of good/bad design – but what are you exactly looking for when you are making those choices?) – and then opened it up for audience participation and questions/comments. We really should have recorded this session as there was a wide- range of points made, few of which I can now recall! You really needed to be there to get the full impact of the panelists’ views and the lively discussion that ensued.

Steve Chilton SoC Chair

When I last wrote about my theory of GeoBabel I seem to recall saying I was retiring it. That’s still true but seeing as I didn’t actually write the newsletter my geoconscience is clear on this point.

A recent report highlighted concerns that the US Air Force has over troops using location based apps, with the Air Force posting a warning on an internal web site on the matter.

“All Airmen must understand the implications of using location-based services,” said a message on the internal Air Force network.
The features, such as Facebook’s ‘Check-in,’ Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt “allow individuals with a smartphone to easily tell their friends their location,” it said.
“Careless use of these services by Airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications,” said the message, which was posted on November 5, according to spokesman Major Chad Steffey.

The age old adage about Military Intelligence being an oxymoron springs to mind.

But even then, GPS just doesn’t work indoors most of the time and indoor location and routing has become something of the Holy Grail for navigation technology vendors. Granted there have been lots of technologies developed which use non A-GPS technologies such as RFID and other near field sensors. But so far these all require a not insignificant investment to install and require specialist devices to take advantage of; none of which are as ubiquitous as the combination of smart phone and GPS.

Maybe we’re looking too deeply at this challenge. Take a category of location that lots of people go to, such as shopping malls, where GPS usually isn’t available, and map each mall to a high degree of accuracy, both in terms of the layout of the mall and in terms of the stores and concessions in that mall. Add in key features, such as multiple levels, staircases, escalators and lifts and you can build a spatial map of the mall which doesn’t need sensors. Simply tell your phone where you are and where you want to go and you can provide simplistic directions, without the need for GPS.

It’s obvious when you stop to think about it.

Whilst it’s not the voice guided, constantly updated, turn by turn navigation that we’re used to in conventional satnav, as a technology it’s simple to implement and FastMall, an iPhone app, has done just that.

So how does it work? Like most location based apps, FastMall taps into your iPhone’s onboard GPS allowing you to search for malls near to you (as a side note, this location based search isn’t geofenced at all, searching for malls around me in Berlin returns a huge list of European malls). Select the mall you’re either at or are going to and you download the mall’s map and data to your device. At this stage your need for GPS or even for a cellular signal is over. The locations of each store in the mall (even including toilets, staircases and escalators) are now on the phone. Navigating to the store you need is elegantly simplistic; simply tell the app where you want to go and tell the app where you are and you get a (literally) step by step guide to reach your destination.

Let’s take an example of a mall I know reasonably well; the Westfield Valley Fair mall in Santa Clara, California. I’ve parked my car in the car park next to Macy’s and I want to get to the Apple Store. Assuming I’ve downloaded the mall map data (and this is in the US so there’s no guarantee I can do this in the car park as this is AT&T territory) I simply search for the Apple Store as my destination and then search for Macy’s as my starting point and I’m presented with precise walking directions on how to get there.

1. Exit Macy’s
2. Walk until you see Nine West and go straight
3. Walk until you see Marc Ecko Cut & Sew and turn slight left
4. Walk until you see Jessica Mcclintock and go straight
5. Walk until you see MAC Cosmetics and go straight
6. Walk straight until you see your destination on the right
7. Enjoy. You have reached Apple Store

I’ll forgive the app’s designers the slightly stilted phrasing in the directions but overall the experience is simple and seamless. It doesn’t take a vast leap of the imagination to see this sort of hybrid A-GPS and spatial map technique extended to other types of location, such as railway stations, conference centres and other pedestrian areas.

Now yes, I know this is iPhone only, yes I know this needs a high end smartphone and yes, this would really benefit from being integrated into an overall maps and navigation experience. But it’s a significant step towards real world, usable indoor navigation. Sometimes the simple approach outpaces the technological sensor driven approach we’ve become used to. Expect to see this sort of technology coming your phone in the not too distant future.

Of course, in order to develop those technical specifications, we need to define what a POI is in the first place. There’s a lot of acronyms flying around (3 in the first paragraph of this post alone) and a lot of conflicting terminology further confusing the matter. Even the most cursory of glances through Web content on this topic shows the terms Place, Location and POI being used interchangably and so as part of the discussion I tried to codify the difference between, and most importantly the inter-relationships between, these three seemingly straightforward terms. The genesis for this post first appeared on the POIWG public mailing list last week (and W3C working groups conduct their business as much as possible in public) but I’ve fleshed it out in a bit more detail here.

So what is a POI? … Wikipedia defines a POI as a Point Of Interest … a “specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting”. But we really need a more subtle and complex definition.

To my mind, a POI is part of a loosely coupled and inter-related geographical terms, comprised of (in generalised order of scope and granularity) Locations, POIs and Places.

A Location is a geographical construct; a physical fixed point on the surface of the Earth. It could also be used to describe a fixed point on the surface of another celestial body but for the purposes of this Working Group, we’ll restrict the scope to terrestrial geographies. A Location is described by a centroid (a longitude and latitude in a widely adopted system, such as WGS-84) and an extent, either a Minimum Bounding Rectangle or a vector set. A Location is temporally persistent, it does not generally change over time.

A POI is a human construct, describing what can be found at a Location. As such a POI typically has a fine level of spatial granularity. A POI has the following attributes …

1. A name
2. A current Location (see the commentary below on the loose coupling of POI and Location)
3. A category and/or type
4. A unique identifier
5. A URI
6. An address
7. Contact information

A POI has a loose coupling with a Location; in other words, a POI can move. When this occurs, the loose coupling with the previous location is removed and, providing the POI continues to exist, it is then coupled with its new Location. This can happen when the human activity at the POI relocates, such as when your local coffee shop relocates to a new address. It’s still your local coffee shop, it’s now found at a different Location.

A POI has temporal boundaries; it starts when the human activity at that Location commences and ends when human activity ceases, such as when a company or organisation goes out of business.

And then there’s a Place, which is also a human construct and typically has a coarse level of spatial granularity. Places are typically larger scale administrative constructs, either informally or formally defined. Countries, States, Counties, Districts, Neighbourhoods and postal codes or telephone area codes are all Places. Places are also informally or colloquially defined, such as the Home Counties in the United Kingdom and The Bay Area in the United States.

Places have spatial relationships; with parents, children, adjacencies and “contained by” semantics. Places also have the same attribute set as POIs, although with differing interpretations based on scale; for example, the address of a Place or its URI would refer to the address of the administrative or governing body of the Place.

A Place typically contains multiple POIs and can also be coterminous with a POI. In the former case, a Place, such as a city or a neighbourhood, will contain multiple POIs. In the latter case, a Place and a POI will occupy the same position and extent, such as in the case of Yellowstone National Park, which is both a Place and a POI.

As discussions in the POIWG get deeper and deeper into what constitutes a POI and, equally importantly, what doesn’t, it’ll be interesting to see how much of my take on the subject survives.

Last week an article entitled “Can you digital photos reveal where you live?” was posted on the Big Brother Watch blog; pop over there and read it for a moment, it’s only three paragraphs long …

… welcome back. My first thought on reading that article was “well yeah, duuh“. Followed up by the slightly more lengthy thought of “well yeah, duh … of course a geotagged photo can reveal where you live, if you’ve enabled geotagging, if you understand EXIF data, if you’ve uploaded the photo to the internet and if you’ve set the visibility of that photo to public … upload enough photos and sufficient patterns will emerge that should give a good indication of where you live“.

But I’d be willing to bet that most people’s thought on reading that article was much more along the lines of “s**t … I didn’t know that“. For those of us in the location industry, we should sit up and take note of this reaction.

Here on the inside of the location industry it’s relatively easy to dismiss articles such as the Big Brother Watch one. We know enough to make an informed decision on whether the location component of a service is opt in or opt out. With a bit of background research we can even find out whether a service utilises your location in stealth mode, with potentially abusive consequences, such as recent news that some free apps on the Android mobile platform are secretly sharing their location without the user’s knowledge.

With today’s ever changing technology making a level of technical sophistication available to the mass market that would have been unheard of 10 years ago, maybe it’s time for Location to engage the services of a good Public Relations agency to move the visibility and benefits of the location component of services away from the dense legalese of the EULA and away from burying the control of location deep away inside a densely nested set of configuration options.

If we don’t then the first that the majority of the general public will hear of location privacy will be when a story hits the tabloid media, such as when proof of infidelity of a celebrity due to a location based app on their phone is used in a high profile divorce proceedings. And that will be a sad day for all of the location industry.