POSO: A Generic Positioning System Ontology Maxim Van de Wynckel [0000-0003-0314-7107] and Beat Signer [0000-0001-9916-0837] Web & Information Systems Engineering Lab Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium {mvdewync,bsigner}@vub.be Abstract. While satellite-based positioning systems are mainly used in outdoor environments, various other positioning techniques exist for dif- ferent domains and use cases, including indoor or underground settings. The representation of spatial data via semantic linked data is well ad- dressed by existing spatial ontologies. However, there is a primary focus on location data with its specifc geographical context, but a lack of solu- tions for describing the diferent types of data generated by a positioning system and the used sampling techniques to obtain the data. In this pa- per we introduce a new generic Positioning System Ontology (POSO) that is built on top of the Semantic Sensor Network (SSN) and Sensor, Observation, Sample, and Actuator (SOSA) ontologies. With POSO, we provide missing concepts needed for describing a positioning system and its output with known positioning algorithms and techniques in mind. Thereby, we enable the improvement of hybrid positioning systems mak- ing use of multiple platforms and sensors that are described via the presented POSO ontology. Keywords: positioning system ontology positioning techniques po- sitioning algorithms 1 Introduction Whether we are developing a system for indoor or outdoor navigation or sim- ply want to track the location of an object on a table, a positioning system that tracks the position based on one or multiple technologies and algorithms is needed. While outdoor positioning solutions mainly rely on satellite positioning systems such as the Global Positioning System (GPS), building-specific deploy- ments and implementations using a wide variety of techniques [26,13] can be used indoors. In order to facilitate the interoperability between different positioning sys- tems or client applications, we need a vocabulary that is generic enough to cover various use cases. Expressing the position or movement in a geographical con- text is already well established using ontologies and vocabularies such as the Basic WGS84 vocabulary [3], the Location Ontology [10], GeoSPARQL [2] or the LinkedGeoData ontology [33]. However, positioning systems do not always need to operate within a geographical boundary and may even provide more