The Gartner Hype Report has some interesting analysis of where various technologies currently lie along the hype curve.

Particularly interesting to me is the analysis of LBS.

Location-aware technologies should hit maturity in less than two years. Location-aware technology is the use of GPS (global positioning system), assisted GPS (A-GPS), Enhanced Observed Time Difference (EOTD), enhanced GPS (E-GPS), and other technologies in the cellular network and handset to locate a mobile user.

Location-aware applications will hit mainsteam adoption in the next two to five years.

Nextel phones in the US already have exposed the location API to developers. Lots of other devices are using them now for finding friends or getting info on various locations.

Interesting, they also state that maintstream adoption of the semantic web is five to ten years away. I’m surprised that they predict so far out with the growing support for Microformats and other semantic technologies that are being used by Yahoo, Technorati, and search engines such as Swoogle which require content to already exist in order to have something to search. See the article Geospatial Semantic Web Blog: Pinging the Semantic Web for some more discussion on how to spread the use of the semantic web using ping services

SlashGeo picked up on a recent Geowanking mailing list discussion of indoor location tracking options. I decided to pull all of the responses together into a single list for easy clickage.

I would also suggest checking out and/or subscribing to bookmark lists like http://del.icio.us/tag/geolocation+wifi.

Wifi Positioning Technologies

PlaceLab

Intel R&D lab, have a large number of papers, software, and dbs on location using wifi and other techniques

Loki

Commercial company (part of Skyhook Wireless) that has a Windows client

Navizon

another commercial option, GPS/GSM/Wifi and clients for variety of
mobile devices

Plazes

social network using geolocation techniques

Herecast

Open infrastructure with a community built database

Microsoft Research RADAR

An In-Building RF-Based User Location and Tracking System. There is a package for people who may beinterested in using RADAR and that the package includes source code. It should be easy to obtain coming from a university.

HawkTour: A Mobile, Context-Aware Tour Guide System

HawkTour, installed on a TabletPC, allows visitors to tour the IIT main campus and learn about the university including its world-renowned architecture, excellent academic programs, and student life.

Location Estimation for Activity Recognition

University of Washington video where Dieter Fox illustrates how Bayesian filtering can be applied to estimate the location of a person using sensors such as GPS, infrared, or WiFi.

Ekahau

this might be the most popular WiFi positioning system

PanGo Locator

Wi-Fi-based, active RFID wireless asset tracking solution

WhereNet

Using TDOA measurement rather than Signal Strength, hence
the standard 802.11 AP and NIC can not be used.

WPI Precision Indoor/Outdoor Personnel Location Project

The overall goal of this project is to protect the lives of emergency responders and to enhance their ability to accomplish their missions through research and development of systems for personnel location and tracking, physiological status monitor

Citation

These links came from the following contributors:

• Andrew Turner – aka ‘me’
• Kris Kolodziej
• Mateusz Loskot
• Binghao Li
• Mike Liebhold

Please feel free to let me know of any more that you may know of.

GeoNames is YAG (yet another geocoder), but behind the curtains lie many cool features. The most unique of which is a reverse geocoder.

Reverse geocoding is converting Latitude & Longitude to a place name. This is the other side of the mirror from traditional geocoding, which converts a place name into latitude & longitude. Why would someone want to reverse geocode you ask? With reverse geocoding you can convert your GPS tracklogs into meaningful locations easily, or allow users to click on a map and get back actual location of where they’re clicking.

The GeoNames API provides an interface for getting nearby postal codes, country, or most specific: place names.

Example

HighEarthOrbit offices: http://ws.geonames.org/findNearbyPlaceName?lat=42.4266&lng=-83.4931&style=full

returns:

<geonames>
  <geoname>
    <name>Northville</name>
    <lat>42.43111</lat>
    <lng>-83.48333</lng>
    <geonameid>5003956</geonameid>
    <countrycode>US</countrycode>
    <countryname>United States</countryname>
    <fcl>P</fcl>
    <fcode>PPL</fcode>
    <fclname>city, village,...</fclname>
    <fcodename>populated place</fcodename>
    <population>6360</population>
    <elevation>252</elevation>
    <admincode1>MI</admincode1>
    <adminname1>Michigan</adminname1>
    <admincode2 />
    <adminname2 />
  </geoname>
</geonames>

The whole geo-enchilada

Lastly, to make you really feel warm and good inside, the GeoNames database is provided for direct download under a Creative Commons Attribution license. Yum, free data.

See the GeoNames Blog post about it.

I mentioned Metacarta last week after I saw their presentation at Where2.0.

They mentioned having a public GeoParser API available for developers to play around with. So I passed in one of the output feeds from FoFRedux (a feed aggregator that supports GeoRSS) through the Metacarta GeoParser to produce a map of locations that show up in my feeds.

FoFRedux -> Metacarta Example: SlashDot article locations

So now you can use a feed aggregator to display, say locations of articles and posts for your friends feeds. Or locations of Flickr photos, or even UPS/Fedex package tracking. The example just shows the image output, but the GeoParser can output GML or GeoMarkup XML, and JSON for better intergration into other applications.

Eye-Fi produces a card, Eye-Film, that is an SD card that can geolocate photos taken on it. This is an incredibly smart and easy way to add location to photos and still use any camera you choose. It does this by measuring the Wifi signals in the area and talking to Loki (no, not that one)

Unfortunately, it’s not available until Fall 2006.