We've all heard the three rules of real estate — location, location, location. It's true. The value, utility and enjoyment of your home is indeed based on location. Proximity to good schools, mass transit, shopping, medical services and green space are just a few of the location factors affecting the perceived and real value of your living place. Similarly, the success of public agencies and business places depends heavily on location.

Enter Local Positioning Systems with a new paradigm for knowing "where you are when". By leveraging the location rendering ability of GPS, cellular networks, WiFi access points, and a range of other sensors and networks, we can unlock location services to enable better decision making. Emergency response, asset/property tracking, personal safety, retail sales, and routing are just a few of the domains in which decision making can benefit from location-based information services.
 

But the need and opportunity for Local Positioning Systems do not end at the door step. A multitude of opportunities and challenges exist within the indoor environment.
 

What are the current and evolving technologies for rendering location services indoors? GPS devices usually don't work indoors. How can we equip our first responders to give them indoor location information for search and rescue in an emergency? How can we best exploit existing and emerging infrastructure to deliver accurate indoor location services to support businesses, government and the consumer?
 

This textbook leads us from "macro to micro", taking us on a tour of dozens of existing and possible indoor location based services applications. We get a grounding in the underlying common requirements of such applications and we learn about the relevant features and benefits of current and emerging technologies. The author provides enough technical detail to provide a firm foundation for developers, while stimulating our imaginations with descriptions of dozens of applications.
 

Many technical textbooks neglect the importance of standards. Kris Kolodziej, who has had experience with geospatial standards development, doesn't make that mistake. Today's location services depend on a set of standard open interfaces and encodings that support plug and play integration and that create market opportunities for the diverse businesses who provide the links in the location services value chain.
 

This book brings together for the first time everything that should be in a single book about location based services for buildings, campuses, malls, manufacturing centers and other built environments that preclude complete dependence on GPS. The information is timely, because many of the technologies have only recently become available as affordable, capable products that are easily integrated into solutions, and there is a growing awareness of what should be possible. Kris Kolodziej is a reliable guide into a near-future world in which people and things will be less likely to get lost.

Mark Reichardt

 

Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC)

The Open Geospatial Consortium, Inc. (OGC) is an international consensus standards organization that is leading the development of standards for geospatial and location based services.

OpenLS

The OGC's Open Location Services Initiative (OpenLS) is devoted to the development of interface specifications that facilitate the use of location and other forms of spatial information in the wireless Internet environment. The purpose of the Initiative is to produce open specifications for interoperable location application services that will integrate spatial data and processing resources into telecommunications and Internet services infrastructure.

OpenLS brings the many companies and industries of the location services value chain together to build products and services that are based upon open specifications for location service interfaces and related protocols.

 

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