Introduce concepts for locations and persons

[kaikreuzer]

migrated from Bugzilla #443908
status NEW severity enhancement in component Core for ---
Reported in version unspecified on platform All
Assigned to: Project Inbox

On 2014-09-12 04:45:51 -0400, Kai Kreuzer wrote:

To better support use cases like geo-fencing, iBeacons / BLE tags, wearables and rules with user-context, we need to introduce new concepts for locations and persons.
There were already discussions around this in the past, e.g. https://www.eclipse.org/forums/index.php/t/781501/ or https://bugs.eclipse.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=423550

[pinkfish]

I don't think you need people, really, but locations are a very strong semantic link. For doing occupancy in a useful way rooms/location are needed to be able to pull flags and stats up a level from things to the thing they are inside. Making the rooms in a structure also gives the structure inherent information about occupancy too. A movement sensor gives some level of occupancy but an alarm gives a much stronger signal, for example. The alarm is at the structure level but a motion sensor is at the room level. We could automatically track occupancy in locations/structures just by using motion sensor input in a room + alarms to control the top level state.

iBeacons and things like that help here too, but I think the gains you get from allowing general purpose automation to exist is pretty high.

[kaikreuzer]

Wow, this issue is already old...

I'd just like to revive it with a citation from a comment on openhab/openhab-android#914 (comment):

We could use Location items for persons and phones should then be assigned to (exactly) one of these items. If they were tagged with object:person, the app could do a simple rest request for all items with such a tag and ask the user to select one (this would need to be done somewhere in the main settings).

All our rooms/homes/offices/otherplaces are usually already modelled as Group items - if those were tagged with object:place (or whatever identifies an item to be a place), this list could be requested by the app and beacons and geofences could be assigned to those.

To be able to do this, Location items should not only allow geo-coordinates as a state, but also place-item names, but this is a change that was anyhow considered when introducing Location items.

This concept would allow us to have minimal efforts wrt introducing new kinds of entities or concepts - we could rely on the semantic tags and still cover the major use cases.