Ryan Sarvar

locationaware.org

We were here last time doing a BoF session. Now here we are on stage presenting. Making an announcement which will hopefully show some good progress.

Started 2 years ago when I started at SkyHook. Wanted to think about what it means to be location aware. How can we enrich the web with a lot of that information. We launched loki toolbar to make these location enabled channels.

Changed this so that sites can call an API to get location to drive relevant content. Basic API to call the toolbar and do something meaningful with the location information.

This type of information and spec belongs a spec for browser vendors. Want the same experience everywhere, laptop or mobile phone.

We’re hoping that people will be able to write an application with HTML and JS rather than, for instance Objective C on iPhone.

“LocationAware’s goal is to help drive the standardization of how a user’s geolocation is exposed to a website through the browser”

Handles privacy and other issues. Brokers information, they get back an accuracy level, latitude and longitude.

We propose to expose this through the DOM. May also do it in HTTP headers. Also different ways of specifying “air meters”.

API looks very simple. 4 lines of JS to get location with a callback. Polling also available, more useful for mobile devices.

Announcement is that we’re working with Mozilla Labs to create a prototype extension. Available in June. We want to work with how we can do this. How do we ask the user what they want to make available and how do we make it available? Also working with W3C to make a charter for this type of thing.

Really important part is that Yelp will also be implementing the API so that there’s a real user of it available. Hopefully other sites will join too.

locationaware.org

LocationAware: Standardizing a Geolocation API in the Browser

Technorati tags: locationaware, geolocate, where, where2.0, where2008