Subject: [Geopriv] W3C geolocation WG

From: "Alexander Mayrhofer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:47:12 +0200

fyi,

the W3C has chartered a Geolocation WG recently:

http://www.w3.org/2008/geolocation/charter/

"The mission of the Geolocation Working Group, part of the Ubiquitous
Web Applications Activity, is to define a secure and privacy-sensitive
interface for using client-side location information in location-aware
Web applications."

the group has already listed the GEOPRIV group as a liason, so please
excuse if this is old news.

Alex
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From: "James M. Polk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:12:49 -0500

Alex

With respect, do you have information that lead W3C to create this WG?

An example reason would be that Geopriv isn't accomplishing all that 
W3C wants (in whatever direction).

I'm looking for if W3C is planning on specifying anything new, that 
is counter (or contradictive) to what Geopriv has done to date, and is doing.

I'm not suggesting Geopriv rules all SDOs, but wondering what the 
intent is by W3C.

James

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:41:33 -0400 (EDT)

To some extent, I am the liaison for the OGC, OASIS, and the IETF for this
activity. Initially, the group was very much unaware of the work of other
standards organizations. I have provided pointers to a variety of IETF
documents. Hopefully some progress is being made.

Regards

Carl

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From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 13:52:54 -0400 (EDT)

James -

Go to http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/eiif/ to get more info on this W3
activity. Notice the focus on vocabularies.

Regards

Carl

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From: "Dawson, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:58:06 -0500

Hi Carl,

Your reference is to an incubator group on emergency information
interoperability. This is distinct from the geolocation working group
that Alex referenced isn't it?

Anyway - I think it's great that W3C are working on this. I would expect
that they are primarily focussed on *conveyance* for web services. We
have plenty of acquisition (LCP) options, there is conveyance for
presence (SIP), but we need all the interested application domains to
have their appropriate conveyance methods. I had expected to see plugins
for common browsers that can link the client's LCP capability into the
web application stream. It will be even nicer if W3C define this as a
standard browser capability.

I suggest our first goal should be to ensure that they adopt PIDF-LO as
the data-type to minimize the risk of unnecessary transcoding.

Cheers,
Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of [email-masked]
Sent: Wednesday, 24 September 2008 3:53 AM
To: James M. Polk
Cc: GEOPRIV
Subject: Re: [Geopriv] W3C geolocation WG

James -

Regards

Carl

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From: "James M. Polk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 23 Sep 2008 19:02:14 -0500

>the data-type to minimize the risk of unnecessary transcoding.

this point is part of the reason I am asking.

---

From: "Alexander Mayrhofer" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 09:21:59 +0200

James,

> With respect, do you have information that lead W3C to create this WG?

no, i just came across that page via a bookmark sharing site - no
relation at all to the actual WG

> I'm not suggesting Geopriv rules all SDOs, but wondering what the 

It seems to me they are looking at conveyance mechanisms for location
information between user agents (browsers) and web applications. Looking
at the wide array of  plugins and sites that are interested in gathering
location information, that seems a reasonable topic to me, and - ihmo -
the GEOPRIV WG was never focused on supporting the "Web 2.0" (buzzword,
i know) crowd. Look at things like

 http://fireeagle.yahoo.com/ 
 http://plazes.com 
 http://www.dopplr.com/ 
 http://my.loki.com/ 

that's where the buzz currently is, and i think that's the niche that
the W3C group is aiming at. It seems to me there is still a huge gap
between those services and the work that comes out from the GEOPRIV WG
(i don't know of a single service that uses PIDF-LO in that space) - so
if that W3C group can narrow down that gap, it would definitely reduce
the variety of location conveyance (and provide for interopable
applications).

just my 2c

Alex

---

From: "Tschofenig, Hannes (NSN - FI/Espoo)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:32:50 +0300

You have a very good and valid point, Alex. 

With Henning & Richard we wanted to extend the scope of the work in
http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-barnes-geopriv-lo-sec-03.txt to figure
out whether there is something missing out there. Maybe that's a
starting point when it comes to security and privacy specifically
related to the communication models.   

Ciao
Hannes 

>From: [email-masked] 
>[mailto:[email-masked]] On Behalf Of ext Alexander Mayrhofer
>Sent: 24 September, 2008 10:22
>To: James M. Polk
>Cc: GEOPRIV
>no, i just came across that page via a bookmark sharing site - 
>no relation at all to the actual WG
>
>> I'm looking for if W3C is planning on specifying anything 
>new, that is 
>> counter (or contradictive) to what Geopriv has done to date, and is 
>> doing.
>> 
>It seems to me they are looking at conveyance mechanisms for 
>location information between user agents (browsers) and web 
>applications. Looking at the wide array of  plugins and sites 
>that are interested in gathering location information, that 
>seems a reasonable topic to me, and - ihmo - the GEOPRIV WG 
>was never focused on supporting the "Web 2.0" (buzzword, i 
>know) crowd. Look at things like
>
>that's where the buzz currently is, and i think that's the 
>niche that the W3C group is aiming at. It seems to me there is 
>still a huge gap between those services and the work that 
>comes out from the GEOPRIV WG (i don't know of a single 
>service that uses PIDF-LO in that space) - so if that W3C 
>group can narrow down that gap, it would definitely reduce the 
>variety of location conveyance (and provide for interopable 
>applications).
>
>just my 2c
>
>Alex

---

From: "Romascanu, Dan (Dan)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:17:37 +0200

> niche that the W3C group is aiming at. It seems to me there 
> is still a huge gap between those services and the work that 
> group can narrow down that gap, it would definitely reduce 
> the variety of location conveyance (and provide for 
> interopable applications).
> 

Buzz or not (probably yes) 'tiny' devices running browsers are a reality
and if W3C can fill in the gap with defining how location information is
to be conveyed between browsers and servers I would agree this is a good
thing. 

Dan

---

From: John Morris <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:01:51 -0400

FWIW, we are members of W3C and Alissa Cooper and I plan to 
participate in the new WG there....  We'd be interested in thinking 
through concrete messages (such as the below) to take to that 
group....

John Morris

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From: "James M. Polk" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 12:39:25 -0500

normally, when a user uses a browser, they don't turn on or off 
features per site they connect to. With this in mind, how exactly is 
privacy supposed to be maintained other than having a browser 
location conveyance turned off?

At 11:01 AM 9/24/2008, John Morris wrote:
>through concrete messages (such as the below) to take to that group....
>
>John Morris
>

---

From: Richard Barnes <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:04:49 -0400

(Straying off-topic a little...)

Actually, you could envision doing something similar to what's done with 
pop-up windows today: Drop down a bar at the top of the window that says 
"This site is trying to access your location?  <Allow> <Deny>".	

James M. Polk wrote:
> normally, when a user uses a browser, they don't turn on or off features 
> per site they connect to. With this in mind, how exactly is privacy 
> supposed to be maintained other than having a browser location 
> conveyance turned off?
>

---

From: "Dawson, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:16:44 -0500

I have thought about this in the past. I think a good starting point
would be the notification/verification approach that 3GPP defines for
devices (and which SUPL has just picked up in version 2.0). A browser is
a device as much as a handset is and the same considerations apply.

The user is notified when a location request is made and the location
request does not proceed unless the user verifies that it's permitted.
This can be accomplished in various slick ways on a browser interface.

Users do turn features on/off per site these days - pop-up blocking
being the prime example. Memorizing passwords on a per-site basis is
another example.

I can imagine that W3C would advise that full notification/verification
is the assumed mode that the browser adopts and the user can voluntarily
reduce this to just notification or completely transparent depending on
the nature of the site and their relationship with it.

I don't want to anticipate what their conclusion will be though. This is
the job they'd be undertaking. I'm glad they are looking at it.

Cheers,
Martin

-----Original Message-----
From: [email-masked] [mailto:[email-masked]] On
Behalf Of James M. Polk
Sent: Thursday, 25 September 2008 3:39 AM
To: John Morris
Cc: GEOPRIV
Subject: Re: [Geopriv] W3C geolocation WG

---

From: Hannes Tschofenig <[email-masked]>
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 09:10:22 +0300

I wonder whether it would make sense to spend some face-to-face time 
discussing these aspects at the next IETF meeting. Since we need a bit 
more time (and a whiteboard) we could schedule a separate session.

In 2004 some folks organized a sort of workshop to discuss HIP and 
Future Internet related aspects on the Saturday before the IETF meeting, 
see http://hiprg.piuha.net/workshop/
Maybe we could do something similar.

To keep the discussions a bit more structured and to make sure that 
participants actually thought about the topic a small "paper" had to be 
submitted (a sort of position statement). Here is, for example, my paper 
from the workshop in 2004: 
http://hiprg.piuha.net/workshop/tschofenig_middlebox_traversal.pdf

Would this be something useful?

Ciao
Hannes

Dawson, Martin wrote:
>>>> I suggest our first goal should be to ensure that they adopt PIDF-LO
>>>>         
> as
>

---

From: [email-masked]
Date: Thu, 25 Sep 2008 12:00:57 -0400 (EDT)

Apologies for the confusion.

There has been a Geospatial Incubator project, which closed last year. I
participated in this project - but no direct standards work was done -
more suggestions for other possible W3 activities in geosemantics.

There is now the Geolocation API activity. This activity IS NOT aligned
with any other standards activity that I am aware of, including the OGC
Location Services Interface standards and the IETF work in GeoPriv. I have
been in touch with the W3C staffer that is involved but we have not been
able to connect by phone. I believe that the API was submitted from a W3C
member (Google I think). I tried to get in touch with the proper folks at
Google but have not been able to get contact information.

I would strongly encourage members of this group to comment on the work. I
will also be pushing the OGC Location services community to comment.

The OGC is a W3C member, so I can provide comments on behalf of any
organization who is not a W3C member.

I do have issues with this work being aligned with other SDO activity.

Regards

Carl