Integration of Location Services in the Open Distributed O ce

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 sys tems 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 sys tem individually Additionally it is di cult 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 co ordinate the location process so that available sources of information are used automatically in as e cient 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 o ce automation project