Generating meaningful location descriptions

The user´s location is an important information to describe the current situation or context. In some scenarios, we have to rely on a purely textual description when a digital map is not available. Our approach efficiently generates a meaningful text that describes the current location. As an appropriate text is highly application-dependent, a formalism supports applications to configure the desired description. The underlying geo data may be stored with different structures and techniques, thus we incorporated the idea of Engines into the approach that form an interface to the underlying query mechanisms. To efficiently perform the required spatial computations even on small devices, we introduced a novel spatial index, the Near Index.