Location awareness information representation

LAIR: Location awareness information representation by Kottahachchi, Laddaga and Look, WSEAS Transactions on Information Science and Applications, Volume 2, Issue 8, August 2005, Pages 1144-1149 .

Current location representations model only the geographical aspects of a place. While this is a necessary feature to capture, it is far from sufficient. As a result, many location-aware applications reason about space at the level of coordinates and containment relationships, but have no means to express the semantics that define how a particular space is used. The latter is particularly important in modeling location in the pervasive computing domain. We present LAIR, an ontology that addresses this problem by modeling both the geographical and topological relationships between spaces, as well as the functional purpose of a given space.

Also more information in this paper: A location representation for generating descriptive walking directions

lair (Location Awareness Information Representation), a model of space that can be used to create location-based services. lair can be used to represent not only where a person is, but also what a person is near and what he can do at those nearby places. lair incorporates concepts that people commonly use when thinking about space. Current representations model either the physical relationships between different spaces or the functional purpose of a given space. lair models both of these aspects. (...) lair is an ontology inspired by Ben Kuipers’ TOUR model of a person’s cognitive maps of large-scale spaces

Why do I blog this? the representation of space/place provided in this LAIR model seems interesting, at least in terms of existing ontology of space.