Geolocation Aware Contact List with Jabber

The “User Geolocation” extension (XEP-0080) of the XMPP protocol allows clients to send to their buddies information on their geographic location. This makes it possible for applications like SIP Communicator to show their users a Map (e.g. using the Google Maps web service) indicating the corresponding location for all their contacts.

In this project you would have to find a way to retrieve the geographic location of the user and send it to the buddies in its conact list. Retrieving local position could either be done by trying to determine an approximate location based on the IP address (e.g. a city) or by determining latitude and longitude after querying a local GPS-like device.

The geolocation module would also have to handle incoming location information for a user’s buddies and be able to display it using the Google Map service.

Or, … here’s another idea.

In case you’d managed to get it running with a wifi-based positioning system like weFIND you could also get something like this:

Contacts:
Guillaume Schreiner; schrein (at) clarinet.u-strasbg.fr

References:
XEP-0080: User Geolocation
http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/xep-0080.html

Other SIP Communicator GSoC 2008 Projects
http://www.sip-communicator.org/gsoc

SIP Communicator Developer Documentation
http://www.sip-communicator.org/index.php/Documentation/DeveloperDocumentation

The official SIP Communicator website
http://www.sip-communicator.org