[Ecrit] Location Validation

["Hannes Tschofenig" <Hannes.Tschofenig at gmx.net>]

Hi all, 

There was an interesting today in the NENA ECRF LVF Working Group phone
conference all about location validation and the definition of it. 

Looking at http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5012.txt the definition of the term
location is: 

   Location validation:  A caller location is considered valid if the
      civic or geographic location is recognizable within an acceptable
      location reference system (e.g., United States Postal Address or
      the WGS-84 datum) and can be mapped to one or more PSAPs.  While
      it is desirable to determine that a location exists, validation
      may not ensure that such a location exists, but rather may only
      ensure that the location falls within some range of known values.
      Location validation ensures that a location is able to be
      referenced for mapping, but makes no assumption about the
      association between the caller and the caller's location.

This definition is useful for geo- and civic location information. 

The LoST specification, see Section 8.4.2 of
http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc5222.txt, does more than just fulfilling the
check whether an address maps to a PSAP URI. We provided this functionality
in response to the interaction we had with NENA. 

LoST determines whether there is an civic address in an address database
that corresponds to the civic address provided in the request (using the
<valid>, <unchecked> and <invalid> elements). 

In the conf. call then the differentiation between 'location validation for
routing' and location validation for dispatch' was made. The former would
match the definition in RFC 5012 while the latter is more related to the
question whether a particular civic address exists so that dispatched first
responders can actually go there. 

Do we need to need to clarify or enhance our definition of location
validation? 

Ciao
Hannes