”close by”, ”in the middle” and ”at the far end” to
give a few representative examples. These discretiza-
tions provide relative information which is expected
to be of more use to people than precise distances.
The difference is that ”in 68 meters” can mean the
same as ”halfway down the corridor”, the latter being
of better utility as long as users are not equipped with
odometers.
The prototype text generator simply uses
traverseBy followed by rotateToward for every
skeleton edge of the path, except for the last which
is handled by traverseTo. These functions are
implemented based on the ”fill the blanks” approach,
generating sentences of a fixed structure with the
appropriate landmark, geometry type (e.g. corridor or
room) and direction placed in their positions. Figure
5 shows a screen shot of the client software, showing
a route and the generated NLI.
6 CONCLUSIONS
A novel indoor navigation system adapted to the de-
vice whispering technique was presented. The cen-
tral element of the system is the Map data structure,
which was presented and it’s applicability to natural
language instruction generation was shown, see Fig-
ure 5. Tests of the prototype system uncovered that
common WLAN interface cards (i.e. hardware de-
vices) do not modulate transmission power when in-
structed to do so: all access points which are detected
already respond to the lowest power request. Pending
further inquiry, we are currently assuming that trans-
mission power modulation is not implemented, possi-
bly to reduce the chip’s area.
The implemented text generation system produces
NLI which are quite satisfactory, especially concern-
ing its minimalistic simplicity. In both cases, out-
put and generation complexity, the system compares
favourably with CORAL: the generated text is not
quite as eloquent, but is generated with much less ef-
fort. This indicates that our approach of skeletons an-
notated with landmarks provides adequate informa-
tion for the NLI generator.
The very simple approach to text generation
leaves open many possibilities for extension, e.g.
adding more rules to improve both the natural lan-
guage as well as for selecting landmarks to use in the
text.
REFERENCES
Aurenhammer, F. (1991). Voronoi diagrams: A survey of a
fundamental geometric data structure. ACM Comput-
ing Surveys, 23:345–405.
Aurenhammer, F. and Klein, R. (2000). Voronoi diagrams.
In Handbook of Computational Geometry, pages 201–
290. Elsevier Science Publishers B.V. North-Holland.
Chowaw-Liebman, O. (2009). Context-Sensitive Informa-
tion Systems in Wireless Networks. Master’s thesis,
RWTH Aachen University.
Chowaw-Liebman, O., Krempels, K.-H., von St
¨
ulpnagel,
J., and Terwelp, C. (2009). Indoor navigation using
approximate positions. In (Obaidat and Caldeirinha,
2009), pages 168–171.
Dale, R., Geldorf, S., and Prost, J.-P. (2003). CORAL:
Using Natural Language Generation for Navigational
Assistance. In Conferences in Research and Practice
in Information Technology, Vol. 16.
Fortune, S. (1986). A sweepline algorithm for voronoi dia-
grams. In SCG 1986: Proceedings of the second an-
nual symposium on Computational geometry, pages
313–322. ACM Press.
Krempels, K.-H., Patzak, S., von St
¨
ulpnagel, J., and Ter-
welp, C. (2009). Evaluation of directory-less wlan
positioning by device whispering. In (Obaidat and
Caldeirinha, 2009), pages 139–144.
Obaidat, M. S. and Caldeirinha, R. F. S., editors (2009).
WINSYS 2009 - Proceedings of the International Con-
ference on Wireless Information Networks and Sys-
tems, Milan, Italy, July 7-10, 2009, WINSYS is part
of ICETE - The International Joint Conference on e-
Business and Telecommunications. INSTICC Press.
Ohlbach, H., Rosner, M., Lorenz, B., and Stoffel, E.-
P. (2006). NL Navigation Commands from Indoor
WLAN Fingerprinting position data. Technical report,
REWERSE.
Schilit, B. N., Adams, N., and Want, R. (1994). Context-
Aware Computing Applications.
Wallbaum, M. and Spaniol, O. (2006). Indoor position-
ing usingwireless local area networks. John Vincent
Atanasoff Modern Computing, International Sympo-
sium on, 0:17–26.
Weiler, K. and Atherton, P. (1977). Hidden surface removal
using polygon area sorting. In SIGGRAPH ’77: Pro-
ceedings of the 4th annual conference on Computer
graphics and interactive techniques.
EVALUATION OF AN INDOOR NAVIGATION APPROACH BASED ON APPROXIMATE POSITIONS
201