Navigation was one of the first applications in the context of location-based services. Today, there is a wealth of navigation systems available, especially for cars, and the rise of mobile communication will enable more sophisticated systems which can even take the current traffic situation into account. Small and more powerful devices for mobile communication like modern mobile phones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) will further extend the usage of navigation applications beyond the scope of car navigation.

It is one of our goals to provide a value-added service to NEXUS applications to support them in navigational tasks. To realize such a service, we need to store topological information in the Augmented World Schema (AWS). The navigation service will use this information as a basis for the navigation process. Therefore, the Standard Class Schema of the AWS is enriched by several navigational objects and also by various mobile object types. To reduce the modeling effort, we want to be able to integrate existing topological information, e.g., GDF and ATKIS data, into our model, and therefore we need a mapping from these data formats to our topological description in the Augmented World Schema. Furthermore, we are aiming at combining navigation approaches for outdoor and indoor areas as well as for different types of locomotion (intermodal navigation). In order to optimize navigation procedures we further intend to develop techniques allowing for hier-archical algorithms that can be run on different levels of details of the underlying data.