AGORA-C ISO news

The International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) has finalised a set of standards for location referencing that could prove a huge boost for implementing clever location-based services (LBS) in navigation systems and other devices.

The ISO 17572 series specifies Location Referencing Methods (LRM) that describe locations in the context of geographic databases. An important new development is the support for dynamic location references. These dynamic references (known as AGORA-C) create the possibility to refer to locations 'on the fly' without defining them in advance, and without knowing which particular map database is stored in the device to be used to present the information to the user.

A potential application would be to send live TPEG (Transport Protocol Expert Group) traffic information related to any point on the road network, to a wide range of users and devices such as navigation systems or smartphones, without requiring a pre-coded list of potential locations to be stored or updated in the devices. This considerably enhances the flexibility and potential applications for dynamic content for navigation and other map-based systems.

Here is the technical detail..

ISO TC204 WG3 has finalised the ISO 17572-1, -2 and -3 (AGORA-C) standards, following final comments from FDIS ballot. With this, the final IS (International Standard) for AGORA-C is ready for publication.

The secretary of ISO TC204 will deliver the whole document to ISO CS and will request publication as IS ISO 17572, which should happen by early 2009 (hopefully already in January 2009).

TISA Technical and Standardisation Committee co-Chair Heinz-Werner Pfeiffer of Bosch Blaupunkt is arranging the contact information and procedure for access to licensing arrangements, which will be made available shortly.