Introduction

The IETF is a "sibling" organization to W3C, and especially both organizations are together with ETSI and ITU member of the PSO, which is part of ICANN. As such, the IETF and the W3C together try to see that overlap of work in the two organizations are minimized, through cooperation between liasons and more explicitely appointees from each organization when speaking about specific subjects.

In the Applications Area in the IETF, I personally, as Area Director, suspect we will see more geographical locations being included in protocol elements such as vCARD (RFC 2426) and calendar elements (see Internet-Draft draft-many-ical-ski-01.txt) as examples. For many other protocols being work items in the IETF (the IMPP working group for example) geographical information is high up on the wishlist.

Expected results

I appriciate the W3C taking on the action of working with the data defition of coordinates and take for granted that the definitions and work done at these workshop(s) and future W3C work will be adopted and (re-)used in the IETF as many other standardizations made in the W3C. To be able to be reused though, I am as Area Director for Applications Area interested in seeing that general requirements which the IETF sets on protocol elements are fulfilled so the definitions can be used without modifications and questions from the IETF community. Those requirements include, without excluding others, security, privacy and internationalization -- all areas which I see the W3C have long experience working with, so I don't expect any controversy in this matter.

Further, as Area Director and member of the coordination group between the IETF and W3C I feel that I should take this opportunity to get informed about the result of this workshop so I can more actively see that the IETF does not do anything which overlaps in this area.

Contribution

Personally, I have been working with geographic position/location/presentation systems on and off since 1986. During the years I have been working with everything from local radio based triangulation systems at sea to modern triangulation systems used in the GSM world. The former case as programmer for the data gathering tool and presentation and the latter as specifying the requirements for a product that the company Tele2 today have as a service for its GSM customers.

Further, I have been working for a number of years with categorization, indexing and search systems at Bunyip Information Systems Inc in Canada (systems such as Archie and Whois++) and I have experimented using geo coordinates to help users navigate vaste amount of data. I have also helped the Swedish Calendar Initiative in discussions regarding geo coordinates and calender events (i.e. seeing that one can use the triple What, Where, When for looking for events).

Last but not least, I am a fanatic sailor, and of course I experiment with computers and software using various kinds of GPS/mapping services in my boat. I.e. the fact that I was introduced to geo services when being in the Royal Swedish Navy 1986-1988 made me never really leave that area...

Patrik Faltstrom

Area Director, Applications Area

IETF