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

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.

Citation

Van de Wynckel, M. and Signer, B.: "SemBeacon: A Semantic Proximity Beacon Solution for Discovering and Detecting the Position of Physical Things", Proceedings of IoT 2023, 13th International Conference on the Internet of Things, Nagoya, Japan, November 2023