Presentation at FOSDEM 2025

Discovering smart devices in the physical world often requires some type of indoor positioning system. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are a well-established technique to create scalable lowcost positioning systems for indoor navigation, tracking and location awareness. While various BLE specifications aim to provide a generic way to uniquely identify a beacon and optionally detect its location, they are either deployment specific or do not broadcast enough information to be used without a proprietary database containing the locations of installed beacons. We present a novel BLE advertising solution and semantic ontology extension called SemBeacon that is backwards compatible with existing specifications such as iBeacon, Eddystone and AltBeacon. With the help of a prototype application, we demonstrate how SemBeacon enables the creation of real-time positioning systems that can describe their location as well as the environment in which they are located. In contrast to Eddystone-URL beacons which were originally used in Google’s Physical Web project to broadcast web pages of physical objects, SemBeacon is a specification for broadcasting semantic data about the environment and positioning systems that are available within a beacon’s proximity using linked data.