Introduction

This chapter looks at the need to meet the specific requirements of in-car systems, hand-held mobile devices such as mobile phones and PDAs, space publishing, and position proxy services. User scenarios and corresponding delivery solutions are described within the Microsoft .NET and MAGIC Services Protocol Version 2.0 (MSP 2.0) frameworks. The underlying concepts apply in general to implementations using a request-response model, encoding parameters in XML documents, and the use of SOAP to carry the requests and responses between client and server.

MSP 2.0 enables clients to access servers that model navigable spaces of any size. For large spaces, from regions as large as the entire planet down to a single country or perhaps a region of a large country, the navigable model is likely to be built and services delivered to a large, mass-market service provider. Examples include large Internet portals and service providers, mobile service providers such as wireless network operators and telematics service providers, and large geodata suppliers. From consumers' point of view, MSP 2.0 enables their application to connect to a server that can supply expert information and navigational guidance for a room, a building, a parking garage, a city, a national road network, or the whole planet. Since the connection and information transfer are based on standards and are widely implemented, the user community will grow to expect these services to be as widely available as voice telephony is now.

Some geographic information is needed as a framework to reference travelers locations as well as their intended travel destinations. Typically the framework data consists of geometry and attributes that define administrative regions such as countries, provinces, cities, and towns as well as roadways and other elements of the fixed transportation infrastructure. Large data suppliers are becoming increasingly aware that "real-time" distribution of framework geographic information will be the norm in the near future. Although connectivity constraints and the lack of standardized application-ready delivery formats have limited direct network distribution in the past, it is rapidly becoming both possible and desirable for large data vendors to deliver this data or information derived from it on an as-needed basis. MSP 2.0 provides a complete service-based model for a framework data distribution channel.

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