arno wrote:
The basic needs are:
1. We want to let users define their location manually, possibly from
several applications
2. This manual input must be able to override other sources
(so users can correct wrong location info)
3. we should "save" this manual info for later use
(based on MAC address, possibly other things)
4. saved info must be easily modified/erased
I can see two other needs:
* have a default position, which does not depend on the gateway or anything
else. Ie: user wants its software to believe he is in position XY no matter
where he really is.
Hmm, I guess. I'm not convinced this sort of functionality should live
in "localnet" though (see below)
* set an accuracy: so user can tell: I'm not further than xx meters or
kilometers from position XY.
The Position input does need an accuracy, absolutely. With Address the
accuracy is pretty much implied...
I'm thinking here about web geolocation where websites can ask for location.
For privacy reason, user may wish to give a wrong position or an inaccurate
one.
I see your point. I still think this "lying" should probably happen in
the application that sends the data to the web or if need be in a
separate "fake-location" provider. Most likely it would be in the
application: you wouldn't want your other position-reliant applications
to get confused when you're telling your twitter buddies you're in
Bermuda :)
[clip]
* User provided information should probably trump even more
"accurate" other providers, when master selects current provider. I
guess this could be done with e.g. a flag in .provider-file?
then, why have one more accuracy level, and set user-set provider to that
level. Then, it will be preferred over current providers. Also, from
documentation, it appears, horizontal_accuracy and vertical_accuracy are
defined only if accuracy level is not GEOCLUE_ACCURACY_LEVEL_DETAILED. So, in
order to meet the use cases I describe earlier localnet needs to have its
accuracy level increased anyway.
But this is conceptually different from accuracy. We don't want
applications or web services to believe the accuracy is really accurate
when it's really not -- in fact that would be really bad. we just want
manually set position/address to be chosen over other sources, and I
think a boolean non-changing provider-parameter can give us that.
* Currently localnet works based on MAC address. Are there other
things we could use? We should also probably start looking at the
type of the network we're on: I assume this method is not a very
good one on a GSM data connection for example.
random thought: may be use public ip which could be fetched from sites like
showmyip.com or other similar ones. I don't known if that idea is a good one
though.
I think that would work in a subset of situations the current localnet
works: at least I can't think where this would work but localnet wouldn't.
* When defining the API for setting a manual position, make sure
it's possible to remove the manual position as well.
yes, it's really important.
One related note: I think a "ReverseGeocode.freeform_to_address()"
would be very useful addition in combination with localnet. Think
about the Twitter client example:
* user inputs something like "Helsinki"
* the app uses freeform_to_address() and then saves the received
location with localnet
I'm not sure I understand.
Do you mean localnet should implement org.freedesktop.Geoclue.ReverseGeocode ?
Or should that method be implemented by geoclue-geonames provider ?
The latter: I think we should have a method that turns a freeform
address string into a well defined address HashTable. As an example take
a look at this Nominatim search:
http://nominatim.openstreetmap.org/search?q=Kallio&format=xml&addressdetails=1
The result of that single word search is that Kallio is a suburb in city
of Helsinki, Uusimaa county, Finland. The original data "Kallio" would
not be useful for localnet but the search result would be.
I'll try to work on that project at the end of the week
Cool, feel free to bug me if you have questions.
- Jussi
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