Geolocation BOF

With the advent of free mapping tools like Google Maps, we have seen more and more developers add location-aware functionality and content into their web and mobile applications. This, along with the growth of location providing technologies such as GPS, Wi-Fi triangulation and IP Geolocation make the browser an ideal broker for the users location information.

During this session we will discuss (and hopefully resolve) some of the following questions that arise when exposing a users Geolocation in the browser:

• Location providers
  • What location providers exist?
  • NMEA vs API vs NMEA+API
  • Pros/cons to each?
  • What are the baseline attributes of any location provider?
  • Is reverse geocoding important? Can we set a standard and have multiple vendors?

• Privacy Control
  • Interface and usability use cases. Let’s review some examples
  • How do you control an analog vs binary privacy policy?
  • Should how the data is used by the remote site be part of the privacy policy?

• DOM API
  • How would developers like to be able to request the data?
  • navigator.getGeolocation() vs navigator.geolocation.getZipcode()
  • How do developers envision using the API and resulting data?

If you’re interested in attending this session, please e-mail Michael™ Smith mike@w3.org (not a requirement—just as a courtesy to the organizers in getting a rough estimate of the number of potential attendees).