Towards Qualitative Positioning for Pervasive Environments

In this paper, we present a strategy and set of algorithms for developing qualitative positioning services that are specifically optimised for the environment where they are to be deployed. We argue that for many context-aware applications, this may be more appropriate than more common quantitative location systems, where the positioning API may make unrealistic demands on the underlying measurement service, and unrealistic promises to the application. We show results for an implementation on a shopping street using cellular networks