Discovering smart devices in the physical world often requires indoor positioning systems. Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons are widely used for creating scalable, cost-effective positioning systems for indoor navigation, tracking, and location awareness. However, existing BLE specifications either lack sufficient information or rely on proprietary databases for beacon location. In response, we introduce SemBeacon—a novel BLE advertising solution and semantic ontology extension. SemBeacon is backward compatible with iBeacon, Eddystone, and AltBeacon. Through a prototype application, we demonstrate how SemBeacon enables real-time positioning systems that describe both location and environmental context. Unlike Eddystone-URL beacons, which broadcast web pages, SemBeacon focuses on broadcasting semantic data about the environment and available positioning systems using linked data.

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