Dokument vom 1999-12-15

Position paper from Mannesmann Passo

as Input for
the W3C / WAP-Forum Workshop on

Position Dependent Information

Affiliation: Mannesmann Passo GmbH

Author: Stefan Vieweg

Interests in position dependent information and this workshop

Mannesmann is one of the leading telecommunications group in Europe offering communication and value-added services in wired as well as wireless networks and the internet. Mannesmann’s automotive division is leading supplier for car manufacturers and has broad experience in the quality requirements of these clients. Mannesmann Passo offers value-added services for the wireless community such as telematics services in the automotive environment and WAP-based services for wireless phones.

Automatic derivation of information about the position of the consumer/user in the wireless networks will be THE enabler for killer applications in the mobile environment. Truly, it will be the key point for generating user oriented and convenient location based services. Well-accepted technologies like the internet and WAP will facilitate market deployment and accelerate innovation and new applications.

But still there is the necessity to bring together those technologies with the position information. Mannesmann actively helps to define the required industry standards.

It is our interest to see the way paved for utilizing automatically derived position information in wireless services and therefore we contribute with our experience from a broad range of applications.

For this workshop it is planned to showcase representative applications, requirements and proposals towards the desired standard.

Requirements for position dependent information

The requirements on (automatically derived) information about the position of the user/customer varies significantly on desired the application. The requirements can be described with different attributes of quality (see below) and different responsibilities (e.g. who determines the position, who has access to this information, liability etc.). Not necessarily all characteristics are defined for every application which might be of informative (mostly uncritical), alerting (cost-critical) or safety-critical type.

Some example to illustrate of those application types:

Informative:

The position of the consumer is used as a filter for pre-selection of requested information of any kind. Possible quality requirements start from weather (lowest requirements) to (step-by-step) route guidance (highest quality requirements).

Alerting:

Location based tariffs such as company zones are one example of a cost-critical application. This application requires automatic matching of the consomer’s current position with the company’s premises location such as X-Tower, 32 floor.

Safety-critical:

The initiative from U.S. FCC’s wireless enhanced 911 service mandate led to positioning requirements mostly derived from public needs (PSAP Public Safety Answering Points), but not from the commercial side. Both, handset and network-based positioning technologies fulfilling these requirements have major impact on the cost and performance of mobile networks leading to carrier’s hesitation on investing into such technologies. Moreover this is still a regional approach (USA).
In summary this approach cannot - for the next couple of years – be considered to provide an inplemented standard feature throughout the mobile networks.

In Europe there are first plans to define such requirements: ERTICO – the European organization for intelligent transport systems - intends to set up a committee apparently to address such issues (www.ertico.com).

Telematics applications in the automotive environment offers high-quality safety applications such as emergency call, medical help and breakdown assistance. The requirements are standardized and well experienced by products and practice. A comprehensive specification is defined in GATS (visit www.gatsforum.com and look for the standard CEN/ISO prENV 14821, Annex 6). The position information describe the state of the client; the sets of attributes comprises not only instantaneous coordinates but compressed relevant information in order to enable automatic map-matching independent from individual digital maps. These quality requirements are defined application-related and comprises informative applications such as traffic information, route guidance and alerting applications such as floating car data, diagnostics as well.

Therefore it is obvious that an open structure is required for the WAP and mobile internet standards in order to enable adequately the dissemination of different qualities and attributes of position information.

In order to facilitate the dissemination of position information from/to a mobile client to/from an origin server, a flexible structure is required to respond to performance restrictions of lightweight clients, bandwidth limitations on the air interface and to avoid performance loss in the mobile network, internet and OS-network.

Preferably an overall approach for WAP shall be found in order to avoid ambiguities of the origin and processing of position information which would lead to additional costs and performance reductions.

Proposal

The preferred approach is to formulate a XML-based document type on position information.

There might be different document types for different (classes of) applications, e.g. dedicated telematics applications

From the telematics applications side, apparently GATS-Forum might provide first indications (until the workshop in Feb. 2000) of how this looks like (details on the next working group meetings can be found @ www.gatsforum.com).
If available at the time of the workshop, the approach can be presented.

Expectation from the workshop

It is obvious that there is a retardation in that topic since the initial WAP-Forum / W3C MAIG meeting in July (accordingly with the WAP-Forum meeting) when it was planned to have matters solved by a workshop preferably by end of 1999. But there is rather any progress during the joint meetings between WAP-Forum and W3C since that time. Therefore it is essential to

proceed constructively towards a specifications is required
to draft a (binding) roadmap
define responsibilities between W3C and WAP, but also with other groups
define actions