The Chicago Problem

You just landed in Chicago. As you taxi to the gate, you whip out your iPhone to find friends that may be in town, a good place to eat, and a concert or a play. Today, this would involve visiting many websites and services, and you’d likely give up before getting any good answers. Openlocation.org is dedicated to developing open and practical solutions to this difficult problem.

Today, location information is diverse, dispersed, irregular, and too often proprietary. Web and application developers who want to implement location capabilities must learn a wide range of skills and face a variety of challenges; what starts out as a simple desire to add location awareness can turn into a major effort involving specialized geo toolkits and scaling bottlenecks. As a result, many developers are not yet participating in the Geoweb; when they do, they are re-inventing multiple wheels and the end result is a hodge-podge of proprietary walled gardens.

The Openlocation.org initiative aims to help developers create better location-enabled applications by focusing on practical solutions to our most pressing problems: data sharing and discoverability, the advancement and creation of standards, and the use of common toolsets.

By normalizing approaches and agreeing on common goals, users reap the benefits of having access to structured location-aware data. So when you land in Chicago in the future, an application will be able to launch a single query that can deliver rich, relevant, structured information — before you arrive at the gate.

Openlocation.org goals include:

• Focus on User Experience: Humans must be able to make effective use of available location-related data, even as the total pool of available data grows larger.  This is especially difficult in a mobile context.
• Focus on Human Geographies: The world is a big place, and humans are usually interested in the small subset of it which is populated.  By focusing primarily on humans and the geographies they tend to inhabit, we can limit the problem domain significantly.
• Focus on Proximity vs. Mapping:  For humans, proximity creates possibilities in our physical world.  Proximity can be determined by a rough measurement of relative location.  Mapping, while sometimes useful as part of a proximity-based application, has a different set of requirements and introduces increased privacy concerns.
• Focus on Practical Solutions: While geographers and GIS analysts may seek theoretical solutions to broad problems, we are focused on finding the simplest solutions to the specific problems associated with human proximity.
• Encourage Geopublishing vs. Geocoding: Sharing a location-tagged item with other users should be as easy as it is currently is to geocode it.  Too often applications are sequestering their geocoded assets behind closed doors.
• Develop Approaches for Handling Ephemeral Data: dealing with fixed map features is much simpler than working with mobile, ephemeral data.  We seek ways to share information about ephemeral features (such as friends and events) that are timely and accurate enough to be useful. 
• Unify proximity search: Mobile users are unable to manually scour the web to find location-relevant data; they require a single query that can return structured, highly relevant results.
• Demystify Location:  Involve more developers in the geoweb by standardizing implementation approaches; this includes agreeing on toolkits, data interchange standards, and microformats.  We aim to create tangible incentives for developers to share their location-enabled data, such as easy discovery and easy-to-use tools.
• Social Integration:  We seek standards that enable local search to be informed by individual user preferences, the preferences of their social graph, and the preferences of the public.  This includes integrating with efforts to open the technology of the social graph.
• Rights and Privacy: Not all data can be shared transparently.  We seek standards that enable the federated sharing of location-related data — as widely and precisely as a publisher desires.