On 18.04.2014, at 03:54 , Kevin Everets <[email protected]> wrote: > I'd like to see a visual comparison between recorded and observed Cell > tower info. It may also help to gauge accuracy in a convenient format.
We’ve recently wrote down our next plans in the form of a roadmap at https://wiki.mozilla.org/CloudServices/Location/Roadmap. Currently we put “release cell data” as a goal for the second quarter. This would include both a data dump of the aggregated cell locations (csv, maybe geojson) and sometime later a map visualization of those cells. We are currently investigating any legal problems and considering a license for this data. Our preferred license is currently to put this data into the public domain, maybe via a CC-0 to clarify what we understand under public domain. As an example the aggregated cell data looks something like this (lat/lon shortened a bit for this illustration): lat | lon | radio | mcc | mnc | lac | cid | psc | range 37.93 | 23.64 | gsm | 202 | 1 | 9 | 5273 | NULL | 2688 We estimate the lat/lon as the average over all observations. And the range as half the size of a bounding box around all observations. This estimation isn’t great. But it’s a good enough approach for many use-cases. And in many cases we only have one to 10 observations to work with per cell, which limits the algorithms you can use quite a bit. One thing to note here is that we work with logical cells and not cell towers. For example in UMTS networks, we most likely have three cells around a tower. An example illustration is this: https://developer.att.com/home/support/faqs/lbsfaqs/lbs_basicCellID.gif. As a result it’s actually more useful to return the center of the cell, as it’s more likely a person is somewhere in the area, than it is for the person to be right next to the tower. Since we only know and care about logical cells at this point, comparisons to tower locations or tower databases are a bit hard. > How much effort would be required to add pins for cell towers (which is > generally public info) on the map? Note the above. It’s not that much work and we are planning to get to it in the next weeks. Our plan is to first release the data in csv form, which will allow anyone to draw maps with it. And than a bit later figure out how to best integrate a map into our own website. Hanno _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
