A human-centered semantic navigation system for indoor environments

In this paper we discuss the very important issue of indoor location services. Location services have been in use, and studied, for a long time in mobile networks. 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 user activities (pervasive computing paradigm). Our focus is on navigation, one of the most important location services. Existing approaches for indoor navigation are driven by geometric information and neglect important aspects like the semantics of points/areas and user preferences. 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.