Difference between revisions of "Proximity area"

Revision as of 15:14, 4 May 2016

The things have a field proximity area allows to link a thing to another according to their proximity or, for instance, when a thing is contained by another. One example could be a Shopping center with several businesses divided in two levels. Each business can have its proximity area pointing to a level which points itself to the Shopping center.

Other example can be the countries which are pointed by the country states or provinces and the different municipalities pointing to the corresponding state.

This field can be used for inroom location where there is no access to GPS location or there is not enough precision. It is needed only some proximity sensor causing the update of this property for every thing it "sees". For instance

 An RFID antenna-1 is located on an entry door of thing "room-1". We could make that every tag detected by the antenna causes the update of the corresponding thing by setting its proximityarea pointing to thing "room-1". 

This modifications can be done by a reasoner (See Reasoner proximity Area) or even by the observation enrichment (See Proximity updates)

Important!
Proximity area field is for proximity based services and sensors. Proximity and Location concepts are related:
- If I know the location of two things or places (say A, B), then I can determine how proximate they are (or how close they are). 
- Also, if I'm thing or place (A), and I can detect that (B) is "near" or proximate to me, then I may be also able to derive some location information. 
However they are very different (see for instance this page).
In this platform, both services are provided but they are not used together: 
- proximity are fields can not be used in spatial (location) based parameters
- location can not be used to set a proximity area based parameter