IMPLEMENTING ON-THE-FLY LOCATION REFERENCING - THE AGORA PROJECT

Much information is related to real world objects. Referencing such objects in a machine-readable way is called location referencing, a term from traffic telematics, where objects are seen as locations. One approach to location referencing is to pre-code locations, and store the codes and additional information about the locations in a table. These tables can then be implemented on both sides of the service chain, at the service provider and in the end-user system. This worked well in a time when digital map databases were not yet around in mobile applications. TMC is the surviving example of this approach. A clear disadvantage are the costs of creation, maintenance and dissemination of the tables, and the fact that the number of addressable locations is limited. Although the TMC tables have now been implemented in navigation systems, and these systems actually make the market for TMC, there has been for long a notion of the need for a so-called on-the-fly method for use in map-based systems (on both ends of the service chain). On-the-fly means that a location reference (a code) is created, when needed, using the map database of the sending system, incorporated in a message, decoded by the receiving system using its local map database, and discarded. Key is that the map database of the sending and receiving system may be of different origin, but should be of comparable detail, and that the method should be robust against map differences. It is beyond reasoning that on-the-fly location referencing is a key technology for many future applications in the fast developing world of telematics and multimedia, in the first place for traffic data gathering and traffic information provision services, and traffic management applications, but also for emergency and other position dependent services that are a centre of current attention.