IP Location [Hardcover]

"IP Location" by Martin Dawson, James Winterbottom and Martin Thomson appeals to a broad audience, and is equally applicable to industry as it is to academia. It can be used by corporations who are looking to be a part of the location application value chain, by service providers and carriers who hope to offer location applications to consumers, to government agencies who are looking to build infrastructure to support their national security initiatives, and to academics who are interested in building location applications, or to provide students with a solid introduction to this area of research.

Chapters 1 and 2 provide a background of location services in the IP domain and the Geographic Location Privacy model. Chapters 3 and 4 provide an overview of the Location Information Server (LIS), its architecture and specific protocols. Chapters 5 through to 8 describe how different IP access mediums can make use of the LIS, and the final chapter is written on the important topic of privacy considerations for internet location with a focus on legal challenges. As Ian Hopkins writes in the foreword, "resilience, redundancy, reliability, security, interoperability and efficiency are all the ingredients of a good book".

The book is impressively filled with a great number of `easy to interpret' technical diagrams rich in their presentation. The diagrams present architectures, messaging routines, xml code, policy documentation, configurations. Somehow the authors (who are all practitioners of Andrew Network Solutions) have been able to describe complex matters at a level that is comprehensible by even the layperson. The book also contains five rich appendices including relevant specifications, schemas, protocols and extensions that are timely to the extended list of IP Location stakeholders. It also has an exhaustive glossary on the topic. Of note is how well-structured the book is- taking the reader on a guided tour of the rise of IP Location from the "what" to the "how" to the "when" to the "what ifs".

Location is everywhere. And location means different things to different people and is articulated in different ways. Every location request has a context, and transactions can be triggered based on a location. Things, animals, and people can be located and their proximity is meaningful to varying degrees. For instance, things belong to people, and certainly people always wish to know where their things are, and where they might be in proximity to a building or to their peers or their family. Whether you are on a holiday with your family, at a local supermarket shopping, working in a manufacturing plant, or a doctor in a hospital, location information is plentiful, but not always instant, accessible, and ready for consumption.

It is this notion of instantaneous communications, and instantaneous location determination that pervades this book. What are the means with which I can determine where someone is, based on an IP device they are carrying? How do I go about solving this problem? What elements do I require in a network? What protocols are needed to establish communications? How do I know if the location being recorded is an accurate representation of reality?

Location applications can be classified in many different ways- one could categorise these into control applications, convenience applications or care applications; mass market vs niche, mandatory versus voluntary subscription, enterprise vs service provider grade, push vs pull, tagging, tracking, tracing and triggering applications, government versus commercial vs personal. Today we are seeing already, the adoption of location services for friend finder applications, fleet management, points of interest, navigation and for tracking people especially minors and the elderly.

In the not-to-distant future, location applications will not only be used by emergency services personnel to respond to 000 calls but will be ingrained into the very fibre of our daily transactions. The trajectory of this technology is far-reaching- whether we consider the use of lockable GPS wristwatches for children or RFID implants for medical tracking.

This book goes beyond IP Location and focuses on providing a roadmap for real solutions and standards which are currently receiving a great deal of institutional support. It is groundbreaking as it grants a vision that everyone will have access to location information and that humans too by default will be considered analogous to a node in the network by their very attachment to their PDA or laptop.

If you are working in the field of LBS, I would strongly recommend this book as a part of your personal library. At the moment, there is nothing else like this on the market.

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