SemBeacon: A Semantic Proximity Beacon Solution for Discovering and Detecting the Position of Physical Things

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Citation

Van de Wynckel, M., & Signer, B. (2023). SemBeacon: A Semantic Proximity Beacon Solution for Discovering and Detecting the Position of Physical Things. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on the Internet of Things, 9–16. https://doi.org/10.1145/3627050.3627060

@inproceedings{vandewynckel2023,
	address = {New York, NY, USA},
	author = {Van de Wynckel, Maxim and Signer, Beat},
	series = {IoT '23},
	booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th {International} {Conference} on the {Internet} of {Things}},
	doi = {10.1145/3627050.3627060},
	isbn = {9798400708541},
	year = {2023},
	pages = {9--16},
	organization = {Association for Computing Machinery},
	title = {SemBeacon: A {Semantic} {Proximity} {Beacon} {Solution} for {Discovering} and {Detecting} the {Position} of {Physical} {Things}},
	url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3627050.3627060},
}

Authors

Abstract

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.