SBIR Phase I: Development of Geolocation Name System (GNS)

This SBIR Phase I project focuses on making geolocations direct, easy to remember, and unambiguous. Disambiguation is a critical part of automation and simplifies infrastructure for the autonomous world. Instead of searching for an address to obtain a geolocation, the goal is to provide a portable, user-friendly, human-readable method. Geolocations are becoming more important in this new mobile world and are already critical for reaching a business, picking up a passenger, delivering a package, or transporting a student. Geolocations will become even more important with the expanding use of autonomous vehicles, robots, and drones. Geolocation information with contextual data can be the foundation for powerful analyses and programmable solutions. Data analytics with these records can provide extraordinary results in scenarios of disease propagation, disaster preparedness, emergency response, population movement, and longitudinal student analysis, which can result in substantial savings on health and disaster recovery and more efficient investment in education. The goal of this project is to build an open, dynamic, personalizable geolocation repository that serves as the foundation for the next generation of geolocation- enabled applications, including autonomous and Internet-of-Things (IoT)-related solutions, and the output of which can be used in data analytic models for forecasting health, weather, and population growth and/or spread. Geolocation repository and management tools can add interactivity to the information, with capabilities for geolocation updates, near-real-time tracking, and data notifications and the potential to enable the development of programmable solutions. By adding software application programming interfaces above the repository layer with appropriate functions and commands, the geolocation data can power everyday applications to maintain data freshness while being used to advance data analytics. When provided at edge endpoints with strong authorization mechanisms, the information can be bound to Internet domains, emails, or telephones for portability across operating systems, devices, and apps. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.