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List: kde-panel-devel
Subject: Strawman Proposal: Wireless Access Point Geolocation,
From: Andrew Coles <andrew_coles () yahoo ! co ! uk>
Date: 2009-04-14 13:26:51
Message-ID: 158998.58542.qm () web25904 ! mail ! ukl ! yahoo ! com
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Two-point summary:
1) Exploit geolocation based on visible wireless access points with known locations. \
Works indoors, works without GPS. 2) An abstraction layer over this information into \
named zones, with zone-linked system behaviour - e.g. when I go into lecture theatre \
zone, switch the power management settings onto 'Presentation', get ready for an \
external display to be plugged in, and disable all system-tray notifications.
I suppose I should probably preface this with a little background. By day, I'm a \
research fellow in AI (at the University of Strathclyde, where the Glasgow aKademy \
was held a few year ago), and I'm a few offices away from researchers into mobile \
human--computer interaction. Through them, I find out about some really cool stuff \
to do with location-aware computing, and it's this which led me to think about using \
location-aware computing in slightly-less-mobile devices; i.e. laptops rather than \
palmtops.
So, to begin. Wireless access points are everywhere, and one can make some pretty \
basic location deductions from them. For instance:
- if I can see 'Hello' with MAC x:y:z, I'm at home;
- if I can see my parents'/in-laws' neighbours' AP, I'm visiting them;
- if I can see CIS-WLAN, I'm in the office;
- if I can see Strathclyde but not CIS-WLAN I'm elsewhere on campus.
So at the very least, this sort of information can be used to do ad-hoc geolocation \
with a bit of user-provided data - rough location markers, linked to MACs and/or \
connection names.
Moving one step beyond this, the PlaceLab toolkit combined with the WiGLE database \
allows rough triangulation of location based on a database of fixed-position APs and \
their current signal strengths. If memory serves, on the streets in Glasgow the \
resolution is somewhere within the 50-100m mark. That's not bad - not as good as \
GPS, but for ad-hoc, is pretty good going. Indoors, where GPS falls down, one can do \
much better. I could add to WiGLE the details of where the access points around the \
four floors of my department are - latitude, longitude, altitude. With this, it can \
differentiate between my office and the meeting room along the building and three \
floors down.
So, what can one do with this? With a my bulleted rules, I could tell where I am to \
the level of 'home/parents'/in-laws/office'. I could tie the weather into that, for \
instance, and that would be useful. With WiGLE, one could cross fingers and hope for \
100m accuracy and do something with that; or even with 2000m accuracy, it would give \
a city and country name. All of this is likely more accurate than IP geolocation - \
which thinks I'm 200 miles away.
What excites me the most, though, is the room-level wireless AP geolocation. \
Obviously, the weather won't change when I move around the building - the UK has \
unpredictable weather, but it's not /that/ unpredictable. What does change, \
certainly in my case, is my intention. Using my laptop in my office typically means \
I'm sat doing work; if I go to the meeting room or a lecture theatre, and have my \
laptop switched on, I'm usually about to give a presentation; and so on. For this, I \
envisage defining `zones' with geolocation-based triggers (GPS, wireless AP, or \
otherwise), and attaching effects to these. My running example on giving a lecture \
or talk, for instance:
- Zone is active if either:
* Lat/Long/Altitude points towards me being in in one of the departmental meeting \
rooms;
* Can see Strathclyde but cannot see CIS-WLAN (i.e. somewhere else on campus).
- On entering the zone:
* Battery Monitor to 'Presentation'
* krandr to 1024x768, --output VGA --same-as LVDS
* Turn off all non-critical notifications (so I don't get MSN messages during talks \
;) )
- On leaving:
* Restore settings to previous values
Even without room-level geolocation, it would be neat to do something things as \
simple as:
- Zone is active if either:
* Country Code = GB
* Reverse Geocoding on Lat/Long gives GB
- On entering the zone:
* Set Time Zone to London
- On leaving:
* Restore Time Zone
PlaceLab exists, WiGLE has data, and it's trivial to add extra or even have an \
offline cache. The pie-in-the-sky is the glue to hook that in as a Data Engine, and \
then being able to set behaviours triggered by location.
So, now to flame, praise, or be fairly ambivalent - over to you :).
Andrew
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