CoORDinates – Towards a Consensus-based ORD Standard for the Indoor Positioning Community
The community of indoor positioning research has identified the need for a paradigm shift towards more reproducible and open research. Over the last years, a slowly increasing tendency of openly sharing data and code has been observed in field, facilitating the establishment of baselines and benchmarks, assisting the reproducibility, verifiability, and comparability of scientific results. Nevertheless, accompanying research results with ORD still constitutes the exception rather than the rule in publications of the field. Moreover, since there exist no relevant standards or suggested guidelines, important aspects regarding the data format, the metadata and the overall documentation are typically decided individually by the authors. The data that might accompany scientific publications of the field usually do not undergo peer review as the published manuscripts does, and therefore the extent to which those data are well documented and reusable in practice relies on the rigour and the motivation of the authors.
In this project, we aim at exploring the existing landscape of ORD within the Indoor Positioning community, specifying guidelines leveraging experiences of existing ORD practices of other fields, moving towards a community consensus on the ORD practices that the Indoor Positioning community can adopt. To achieve these goals, we will engage active researchers and other stakeholders with track record on ORD sharing, planning research synergies which will culminate in a public event of this community. The outcome of the project will be a clear step towards a consensus-based ORD standard for the Indoor Positioning community.
The CoORDinates project has been funded by the Swiss Open Research Data Grants (CHORD) of SwissUniversities, under the Track A: Explore Projects funding tool. Moreover, HES-SO has also supported the project, guaranteeing the needed matching funds.
Results at a glance:
- In the work "Evaluating Open Science Practices in Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation Research", we performed a comprehensive review of Open Science practices followed in recent publications in the field, analyzing all reference papers from the 2022 and 2023 editions of the International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation (IPIN). Particularly, the level of use of open data, open code, and open materials, is studied. Moreover, for all works relying on Open Research Data (ORD), our analysis went a step deeper characterizing multiple relevant features describing the data used, such as the technologies, the measurement types, and the environments associated with the open data. The files containing the complete characterization of the reviewed publications and of the Open Science practices followed are publicly available in Zenodo.
- We systematically reviewed the landscape of Open Research Data in Indoor Positioning, presenting and analyzing relevant available datasets proposed and used by the field. Upon analyzing the findings, we elaborated on the commonalities and discrepancies of the existing Open Research Data for Indoor Positioning approaches, discussed potential shortcomings, and shared lessons learned and observed good practices. The work was concluded with a list of guidelines, that researchers can follow as a simple checklist whenever they contribute new ORD, either as a standalone contribution or as supplementary material to research manuscripts. We consider this work to be a useful basis for establishing high-quality Open Research Data in Indoor Positioning. This major contribution will soon be published under the title "ORDIP: Principle, Practice, and Guidelines for Open Research Data in Indoor Positioning", along with all relevant supplementary material.