I think the important thing to pick-up on here is that the W3C are making proposals for ‘location aware devices’ to expose their location data (latitude/longitude and civic, or rather, real world addresses) to web applications. It gives an insight into where we may be heading with regards to increasing locality awareness and accuracy in the coming years.

Of course this will eventually have to filter down to our various adserver providers, but it’s well worth thinking now about how you’d manage your inventory as and when this technology becomes available. As GPS data will be used in the future it raises the issues of how we group/segment this latitude/longitude data together to build compelling products for our respective companies and how agencies plan to leverage this data in future.

Edit: But it’s not just actual location that is being discussed here. The proposals will also take into consideration the elevation (above sea-level), direction of movement and speed of the device. Which opens up all manner of new possibilities.

Already we see greater granularity of GeoIP based buys in the UK with a distinct focus on the regions, imaging if lat/lon data becomes the norm? As and when these proposed standards find their way on to devices and applications we need to think about what impact that will have on the daily machinations of your AdOps and Inventory Management teams.

http://www.w3.org/2009/11/03-geolocation-minutes.html