The purpose of this paper is to establish an application platform that addresses expensive development cost and effort of indoor location-aware application (InL-Apps) problems caused by tightly coupling between InL-App and indoor positioning systems (IPSs).
To achieve this purpose, in this paper, the authors proposes a Web-based integration framework called Web-based Integration Framework for Indoor Location (WIF4InL). With a common data model, WIF4InL integrates indoor location data obtained from heterogeneous IPS. It then provides application-neutral application programming interface (API) for various InL-Apps.
The authors integrate two different IPS (RedPin and BluePin) using WIF4InL and conduct a comparative study which is based on sufficiency of essential capabilities of location-dependent queries among three systems: RedPin, BluePin and WIF4InL. WIF4InL supports more capabilities for the location-dependent queries. Through the data and operation integration, WIF4InL even enriches the existing proprietary IPS.
As WIF4InL allows the loose coupling between IPS and InL-Apps, it significantly improves reusability of indoor location information and operation.
