Interoperability Issues for Geo-Information in the Internet

Haitao Tang

Nokia

haitao.tang@nokia.com

Due to the increasing availability of position information and the surging demand on location-based services, the interest towards location-based services and technologies have grown rapidly in recent years.

Currently many organizations are working on location-related technologies, and how to express and provide location information to applications in the Internet. Such organizations are OpenGIS, 3GPP, LIF, WAP Forum, W3C, IETF, etc.

Each of them basically specifies its own way of providing and expressing location information to applications. Each of them addresses, if any, certain security (including privacy) risks and protections concerning their approaches. This raises a serious problem – the various location information formats, applications, and their associated security methods may not be interoperable in the Internet, when needed.

Therefore, a common extendible way/framework of expressing, transferring, and securing location information for applications in the Internet is needed. Similar to what is done by the IP protocol, this common way "interconnects" the naturally heterogeneous location systems and applications in the Internet.

With such an approach the interoperability between the applications/systems could be enabled. Different applications in the Internet can thus use the same, or choose their preferred, data representation as well as processing and security methods.

This work is therefore to identify the interoperability issues at the different levels/aspects, such as location expressing, transferring, and securing, in the Internet.