Linguistic Location Authority: An Intricate Imperative

Location Authority

Location authority is any set of referents for location references used to describe locations for location-based services (Shafer, 2003). Every location based system requires the representation of the location in effective and efficient scheme. The original approach was based on geometrical models, viz; longitude, latitude, and altitude, and has been employed in Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and other Global Navigation Satellite System (GLONASS) devices. The standards for geometrical model is developed under the World Geodetic System versions, previous, in the series include WGS60, WGS66, WGS72, while the latest was based on WGS84 (Shafer, 2003). The WGS84 has remained the standard location authority for use in cartography, geodesy, and navigation. This is the current location authority implemented on GPS enabled systems. Since its adoption, it has undergone many revisions and improvements. The underlying principle in geometrical approach is Euclidean. Geometrical systems, such as global positioning systems (GPS), designate location in coordinate form, viz; latitude, longitude and altitude. This has been utilized in different navigation systems mostly for outdoor environment. Generally, as can be obviously seen, though geometrical location authority is easier to develop and use for computers and easily manipulated graphically for humans, it is however deficient in conveying intrinsic meaning to ordinary humans (Shafer, 2003). This necessitated the idea of introducing topological referencing to cater especially for indoor environments where GPS systems may not be adequate. Topological on the other hand, can be expressed in hierarchical, descriptive or symbolic form, such as room name, in a particular floor, in a particular building or expressed as a displacement from some landmarks (Mantoro, 2006). Topological systems utilize symbolic location labels to augment geometric systems or provide expressive location. This approach expresses location as a set of atoms in the location authority which are more meaningful to humans yet lack universality at present and are more complex to implement. In some cases, it might be added to provide names or labels to geometric location authority to facilitate better understanding by users. More specifically, hybrid location authority adopts or combines both approaches and it is the approach used by most powerful location authorities (Shafer, 2003).

Furthermore, topological referencing employs names of places to identify locations rather than coordinate systems. Applications of topological or symbolic locations are prevalent in indoors as well as some outdoor spaces depending on the type of applications. Later extension to topological systems includes quantitative reference to landmarks, such as 20 metres to or away from a certain ‘important’ points often referred to as landmarks. This is due to the fact that some locations can only be referenced relative to a conspicuous location or landmark in its proximity. However, it is believed that numerical reference relative to landmark is not sufficiently human friendly. This is because generally, when responding to the question “where are you?”, people respond with a spatial frame in mind relative to the enquirer. The emphasis undertone the scale between the respondent and the questioner as well as the distance apart or relative to a well know location. In this viewpoint, such response is different for two people inside a building, indoors; or for two communicators in the same locality, or two people in places link up by main roads, or two people in different points in a big city or from different geographical boundaries. Therefore, factors such as relative sizes, point of view and so on, help determine the scale of reference and are crucial to understanding spatial reasoning. Hence, modelling location authority in these scales should be distinct as well as requires intricate efforts.