Point of Interest Working Group
Author(s) and publish date
- By:
-
-
Ada Rose Cannon
-
- Published:
Following the successful W3C Workshop: Augmented Reality on the Web in Barcelona last week, work is now underway to establish a Working Group to develop one or more Recommendation Track documents to encode data about Points of Interest. An important standard already exists in this area (KML) which was developed for and is used in Google Earth, but at least two groups have developed extensions to KML to meet their use cases (ARML and KARML). Outside the field of Augmented Reality there are other areas where a standardized, interoperable method of describing real world locations is called for. Primary among these non-AR fields is linked data, especially linked data published by governments, where tying the data to geographical areas can be the key to making sense of what the data is telling us.
A full report on the workshop is in preparation and will be published in the very near future however, a public mailing list has already been established and exists to act as a communication channel for those wishing to help create the charter for the new group and, all being well, participate in it.
We are aiming to make the charter available for review next month with a view to holding the kick off face to face meeting in October, collocated with ISMAR - such a timetable, of course, is entirely dependent on whether the WG charter is approved by the W3C Membership.
" Outside the field of Augmented Reality there are other areas where a standardized, interoperable method of describing real world locations is called for"
This seems to be the core of whats needed as soon as possible for me.
A standard for a physical hyper-link.
That is, the key/value pairs to geolocate any arbitrary bit of data.
Protocols, markup, API access and everything else needed can come later,certainly. But as theres POI's and linked data out there right now and more being put up daily, the sooner we have an agreed upon format for location, the less conversion or orphaned work there will be later.
There is a big need for an agree'd apon set of names and dataformats able to specify a point in space, a orientation, and probably a time as well.
Whatever tracks of discussion are started for the various area's I do think priority should be given for the (earth based) geolocation itself, as that should be (relatively speaking) a small task compared to the others, and very useful in itself.