The emergence of the Spatial Web -- the Web where content is tied to real-world locations has the potential to improve and enable many applications such as augmented reality, navigation, robotics, and more. The Spatial Web is missing a key ingredient that is impeding its growth -- a spatial naming system to resolve real-world locations to names. Today's spatial naming systems are digital maps such as Google and Apple maps. These maps and the location-based services provided on top of these maps are primarily controlled by a few large corporations and mostly cover outdoor public spaces. Emerging classes of applications, such as persistent world-scale augmented reality, require detailed maps of both outdoor and indoor spaces. Existing centralized mapping infrastructures are proving insufficient for such applications because of the scale of cartography efforts required and the privacy of indoor map data. In this paper, we present a case for a federated spatial naming system, or in other words, a federated mapping infrastructure. This enables disparate parties to manage and serve their own maps of physical regions and unlocks scalability of map management, isolation and privacy of maps. Map-related services such as address-to-location mapping, location-based search, and routing needs re-architecting to work on federated maps. We discuss some essential services and practicalities of enabling these services.

翻译：空间网络——将内容与现实世界位置绑定的网络——的出现，有望改进并赋能增强现实、导航、机器人技术等众多应用。然而，空间网络目前缺乏一个阻碍其发展的关键要素：一种能够将现实世界位置解析为名称的空间命名系统。当前的空间命名系统主要是谷歌地图和苹果地图等数字地图。这些地图以及基于这些地图提供的位置服务，主要由少数大型企业控制，且主要覆盖室外公共空间。新兴应用类别（例如持久性世界级增强现实）需要同时包含室外和室内空间的详细地图。现有的集中式地图基础设施因制图工作所需规模巨大及室内地图数据的隐私性，已证明无法满足此类应用需求。本文提出了一种联邦空间命名系统（即联邦地图基础设施）的构建方案。该系统使不同参与方能够管理和提供其自有物理区域的地图，从而实现地图管理的可扩展性以及地图的隔离性与隐私性。地址-位置映射、基于位置的搜索和路径规划等地图相关服务需要重新架构，以在联邦地图上运行。本文探讨了实现这些服务所需的一些核心服务及其实际考量。