Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bharadwaj, Sagar, Seshan, Srinivasan, Rowe, Anthony
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Bharadwaj, Sagar
Seshan, Srinivasan
Rowe, Anthony
author_facet Bharadwaj, Sagar
Seshan, Srinivasan
Rowe, Anthony
contents The emergence of the Spatial Web -- the Web where content is tied to real-world locations has the potential to improve and enable many applications such as augmented reality, navigation, robotics, and more. The Spatial Web is missing a key ingredient that is impeding its growth -- a spatial naming system to resolve real-world locations to names. Today's spatial naming systems are digital maps such as Google and Apple maps. These maps and the location-based services provided on top of these maps are primarily controlled by a few large corporations and mostly cover outdoor public spaces. Emerging classes of applications, such as persistent world-scale augmented reality, require detailed maps of both outdoor and indoor spaces. Existing centralized mapping infrastructures are proving insufficient for such applications because of the scale of cartography efforts required and the privacy of indoor map data. In this paper, we present a case for a federated spatial naming system, or in other words, a federated mapping infrastructure. This enables disparate parties to manage and serve their own maps of physical regions and unlocks scalability of map management, isolation and privacy of maps. Map-related services such as address-to-location mapping, location-based search, and routing needs re-architecting to work on federated maps. We discuss some essential services and practicalities of enabling these services.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_11437
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications
Bharadwaj, Sagar
Seshan, Srinivasan
Rowe, Anthony
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Emerging Technologies
The emergence of the Spatial Web -- the Web where content is tied to real-world locations has the potential to improve and enable many applications such as augmented reality, navigation, robotics, and more. The Spatial Web is missing a key ingredient that is impeding its growth -- a spatial naming system to resolve real-world locations to names. Today's spatial naming systems are digital maps such as Google and Apple maps. These maps and the location-based services provided on top of these maps are primarily controlled by a few large corporations and mostly cover outdoor public spaces. Emerging classes of applications, such as persistent world-scale augmented reality, require detailed maps of both outdoor and indoor spaces. Existing centralized mapping infrastructures are proving insufficient for such applications because of the scale of cartography efforts required and the privacy of indoor map data. In this paper, we present a case for a federated spatial naming system, or in other words, a federated mapping infrastructure. This enables disparate parties to manage and serve their own maps of physical regions and unlocks scalability of map management, isolation and privacy of maps. Map-related services such as address-to-location mapping, location-based search, and routing needs re-architecting to work on federated maps. We discuss some essential services and practicalities of enabling these services.
title Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Emerging Technologies
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11437