Considering Common Data Model for Indoor Location-aware Services

Abstract

Indoor positioning system (IPS) identifies positions of various indoor objects, and is a key technology to achieve sophisticated Indoor Location-Aware Services (InLAS). In most conventional systems, InLAS and IPS are tightly coupled. That is, one system does not supposed to reuse indoor location data and program of another system. This makes individual systems complex and difficult to manage. To cope with the problem, we propose Data Model for Indoor Location (DM4InL), which prescribes a common data schema, independent of implementation of IPS or the usage of InLAS. The proposed DM4InL represents the location of every indoor object in a standard way, by using three kinds of models: location, building and object models. We also design the fundamental API, which implements typical queries to the indoor location data from external applications. The proposed method achieves loose-coupling of InLAS and IPS, which significantly improves the efficiency and reusability in the InLAS development.