Introduction - Ubiquitous Positioning - page 16

raw data. It is likely that commercial opportunities in Whereness will come from
the automatic management and increase in the quality of information.
Most technologies also have a dark side. No doubt a new sort of hacker might
emerge with the objective to spoof false positions. Great care is therefore needed
to take potential abuse into account. It would be unfortunate if rogue users are
telling people false personal positions and informing others falsely of their own
locations but even worse, if false maps were to be created deliberately.
One of the big business opportunities will be about the management of
Whereness by highly trusted organizations. They will be trusted to manage
profiles, to manage identity, to validate sensor information, to validate mapping,
and to host and distribute all a priori information.
1.4.13 Robotic Systems and Machine Intelligence
It may not seem obvious why robotics is relevant to positioning but if we consider
an autonomous machine that can move (i.e., a mobile robot), then knowing its
position accurately is usually a fundamental requirement. A body of research is
building based on the needs of mobile robotics that includes not only the ability to
automatically follow a map but also to build the map in the first place. A classic
experiment involves mechanical “mice” finding optimal routes through mazes. A
more recent idea is substituting a human for the robot where the electronic sensory
systems and guidance algorithms are interfaced to a person who can both build
and then follow digital maps. Once a map has been built and validated it can then
be shared with other users.
If Whereness is destined to be truly ubiquitous then an automatic approach to
the building and updating of maps is necessary. The process of information
automation is an aspect of machine intelligence or artificial intelligence (AI),
another major movement in current computer science research. One aspect of AI
is the development of the Semantic Web. It is about giving information more
meaning so that it can be interpreted by both humans and machines. The long-
term objective is to turn the Web into a massive database and one of the earliest
domains to be tackled in this way is digital mapping.
1.5 Summary
In this chapter ubiquitous positioning or Whereness was defined: it concerns
knowledge of accurate position of important objects and people in all
environments and computer applications dependent on that knowledge.
Geography delivered via the Web (known as the Geoweb) and GPS-based satellite
navigation are touching the lives of increasing numbers of people in the outdoor
environment, but this topic outlines how the built environment and all other areas
can be mapped and included. Maps are changing from 2D graphical images into
3D visualization (common in computer games) and Whereness is promising to