A general hierarchy-set-based indoor location modeling approach

Most indoor business processes are based on the locations of physical objects, so building a well-formed model to represent the spatial knowledge about business process is necessary under ubiquitous computing environments. Current location modeling requires a large amount of manual effort and cannot balance well between multipurpose query and less cost. In this paper, having analyzed the requirements of typical location-based services and the suitability of existing location modeling approaches, we propose a combined indoor location model which extends an improved ‘‘directly under’’ relation-based hierarchy tree model by introducing a core set model, based on the ‘‘level reachable’’ relation. Through a series of modeling theoretical principles and a real example, we show that our model is simple but indoor general enough to capture both spatial connectivity and containment relationships and support more location-based applications. Furthermore, a single-location hierarchical tree model, which integrates room coordinates, the building exits, and corridor intersections together, can navigate more source and objective positions in reality and provide more than one candidate path corresponding to the changing environment. At the same time, our combined model can be more flexible to be integrated into a context-aware system model.