Semantically enriched navigation for indoor environments

Abstract

Location-based mobile services have been in use, and studied, for a long time. With the proliferation of wireless networking technologies, users are mostly interested in advanced services that render the surrounding environment (i.e., the building) highly intelligent and significantly facilitate their activities. In this paper our focus is on indoor navigation, one of the most important location services. Existing approaches for indoor navigation are driven by geometric information and neglect important aspects, such as the semantics of space and user capabilities and context. The derived applications are not intelligent enough to catalytically contribute to the pervasive computing vision. In this paper, a novel navigation mechanism is introduced. Such navigation scheme is enriched with user profiles and the adoption of an ontological framework. These enhancements introduce a series of technical challenges that are extensively discussed throughout the paper.