Integration of Location Services in the Open Distributed Ooce

There has recently been much interest in location systems which enable people and equipment to be tracked as they move within and across buildings. Thus far, such systems have been used in isolation with the result that, although there are often several sources of location information available at any one site, users have to consult each system individually. Additionally, it is diicult for services requiring location information to take advantage of all these sources. In this paper, we put forward the notion of a master location system to coordinate the location process so that available sources of information are used automatically in as eecient a manner as possible. We discuss a number of factors that are of concern to the design of such a system, and describe a particular implementation which we worked on as part of an ooce automation project.