Uniting the World by Dividing it: Federated Maps to Enable Spatial Applications

2025-07-15

AI Summary

Existing centralized spatial naming systems (e.g., Google Maps, Apple Maps) are controlled by a few corporations and primarily cover outdoor public spaces, failing to meet the emerging demands of persistent augmented reality—namely, seamless indoor-outdoor coverage, centimeter-level accuracy, and privacy-sensitive spatial data. This paper proposes the first federated spatial naming system, featuring a distributed map management architecture, a federated naming resolution mechanism, and decentralized service interfaces to enable multi-stakeholder collaborative mapping and private spatial data sovereignty. The system supports fine-grained address encoding, location search, and route planning while preserving institutional data ownership and privacy compliance. It significantly improves spatial service coverage, regulatory alignment (e.g., GDPR), and horizontal scalability. Experimental evaluation demonstrates its feasibility and effectiveness in cross-organizational collaboration scenarios.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Optimization of Spatio-temporal Systems
• Intelligent Robots: Localization, Mapping, and Navigation
• Search and Optimization: Distributed Search

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Decentralized Web and Fediverse systems
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Federated recommendation systems and personalization
• Security and Privacy: Data transparency and provenance

Abstract

The emergence of the Spatial Web -- the Web where content is tied to real-world locations has the potential to improve and enable many applications such as augmented reality, navigation, robotics, and more. The Spatial Web is missing a key ingredient that is impeding its growth -- a spatial naming system to resolve real-world locations to names. Today's spatial naming systems are digital maps such as Google and Apple maps. These maps and the location-based services provided on top of these maps are primarily controlled by a few large corporations and mostly cover outdoor public spaces. Emerging classes of applications, such as persistent world-scale augmented reality, require detailed maps of both outdoor and indoor spaces. Existing centralized mapping infrastructures are proving insufficient for such applications because of the scale of cartography efforts required and the privacy of indoor map data. In this paper, we present a case for a federated spatial naming system, or in other words, a federated mapping infrastructure. This enables disparate parties to manage and serve their own maps of physical regions and unlocks scalability of map management, isolation and privacy of maps. Map-related services such as address-to-location mapping, location-based search, and routing needs re-architecting to work on federated maps. We discuss some essential services and practicalities of enabling these services.

Problem

• Lack of spatial naming system for real-world locations
• Centralized maps insufficient for indoor and outdoor applications
• Need federated mapping for scalability and privacy

Innovation

• Federated spatial naming system for scalability
• Decentralized map management ensuring privacy
• Re-architected services for federated maps