GeolocationProperty

[jaller94]

Use cases:

• Tracking a phone, to perform an action when you enter, leave or stay in an area
• Tracking a vehicle, like a car, truck or a plane
• Tracking a pet or a wild animal for research
• Knowing where a security camera is located

All my use cases point towards a read-only property.

Sub properties

• longitude (required)
• latitude (required)
• altitude (optional)
• horizontalAccuracy – precision of longitude/ latitude (optional)
• verticalAccuracy – precision of the altitude (optional)

I'm unsure in which unit the accuracy is commonly exchanged – maybe meters.

Another option is to define all these proposed "sub" properties as properties and define a Geolocation capability.

[benfrancis]

This is definitely needed, but note that schema.org already provides a GeoCoordinates schema for this.

Example 45 in the latest draft of the WoT Thing Description 1.1 specification demonstrates how the existing schema.org schemas can be used and includes longitude, latitude and elevation. There are also other alternative ontologies though.

My expectation is that the Core Profile may mandate a particular ontology for geolocation, and if it does then I think that's what we should implement support for in WebThings.

In general it would be great to support existing schema.org (and iotschema.org) schemas in WebThings rather than re-inventing the wheel where possible, but iotschema.org is still not very mature.