Ars Technica has a nice introductory article about GeoClue:

A multitude of factors are contributing to a mobile computing renaissance. Some of these factors include the growing availability of ubiquitous mobile Internet connectivity and the rising popularity of netbooks and other Internet-enabled small form-factor devices. These changes are inspiring a renewed interest in location-aware software and web services.

A framework called GeoClue aims to enable integration of location-aware technologies in Linux desktop applications. It is an abstraction layer that makes geolocation functionality accessible through a standardized desktop-neutral API that is easy for applications to consume. It will provide a C library and also expose its functionality through D-Bus, an interprocess communication system that is widely used on Linux.

Gtk+ map rendering widget libchamplain and the recent Empathy-GeoClue XEP-0080 integration announcement are also mentioned. In the KDE/Qt end, Marble would provide similar visualization features.

Technorati Tags: geoclue, gnome, kde, libchamplain, marble