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GeoClue and libchamplain: The location-aware desktop

Submitted by admin on Mon, 05/25/2009 - 09:58
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Author(s): 
Henri Bergius, Pierre-Luc Beaudoin

Through Netbooks and Internet Tablets, your Linux desktop is something you can use everywhere. It knows who you are and what you're doing, but it doesn't know where it is. 

Location is important contextual information, allowing applications to serve you better. The GNOME ecosystem already includes the necessary building blocks for all of this: GeoClue and libchamplain. 

In the presentation we will introduce both libraries, and show some examples that have been implemented with them. 

Some examples showcased in the talk are: 
Empathy - See where your IM buddies are
GNOME Panel Clock - Current local time when you travel
Eye-of-gnome and F-Spot - Show your pictures on a map

We will also discuss applications where location awareness would enrich the user experience: 
GNOME zeitgeist - Display location where you made a document in the timeline
Tracker - Search by location, display results on map
Evolution
Show meeting or a contact on a map
Subscribing to nearby RSS, photos, events
Local weather
Sharing location via microblogs

As GeoClue and the idea of location awareness is desktop agnostic, we can also hold this talk in the freedesktop.org track with Marble developers from the KDE world. 

We're prepared to hold a tutorial / BoF session about how to implement this stuff in your application after the talk. Location and time will be decided based on local conditions.

Author bio: 
Henri works on web services built on top of the Midgard toolkit. His company Nemein provides web solutions for several major companies in Finland and abroad. Since 1999, he's been working on integrating standards like RSS and Microformats into the system and traveling the world advocating for interoperation between open source CMSs. Henri's current passion is combining web services, mobile applications and socially produced geographical data together to build tools for travellers and mobile companies. Henri is also an amateur pilot. Pierre-Luc's been working on browser technologies since he joined Collabora in 2007. He's contributed to both WebKitGtk and QtWebkit . A recent graduate from École de technologie supérieure, he's been involved in FOSS since the beginning of his studies. Pierre-Luc is mostly known as the maintainer of libchamplain. Pierre-Luc's passions include photography and traveling. He combines a little of location awareness in his hobbies by geotagging his pictures or contributing new routes to OpenStreetMap.