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Timeline
| Jan | '10 | Send public request for feedback |
|---|---|---|
| Feb | '10 | Discuss feedback at CAIDA's AIMS 2010 workshop |
| Summer | '10 | Run comparison |
| Dec | '10 | Publish Report |
Background
Governments, researchers, and commercial entities all share interest in mapping Internet resources to physical locations. Governments use this data to prepare and plan for adverse events as well as to tax and regulate. Academics use this data to more accurately depict how the Internet works and how people use it. Commercial interests might use the data to provide better localized services and targeted pricing.
These interests call for geolocation services that provide a an accurate mapping from the virtual world of the Internet to real physical locations. In the late 1990s, CAIDA developed a geolocation service, NetGeo, primarily to support its own research efforts. Although the tool received wide interest and usage from global users, we decommissioned the service in 2003 for lack of resources. Over time, these have been superseded by a mixture of commercial and volunteer efforts. Currently, CAIDA uses Digital Envoy's NetAcuity (tm) service under a no-cost, academic licensing agreement to support our geolocation needs.
CAIDA's Geolocation Tools Comparison Survey
As part of a current Internet mapping project, funded by DHS Cybersecurity project, we conducted a rigorous comparison of various geolocation services, in terms of features, methodologies, and accuracy of output, to the extent we can validate.
We intend to re-run the comparison experiment using additional databases later in 2011; we welcome constructive feedback on the methodology so we can further improve our next experiment.
Publications
A slidedeck overview, "Geolocation Comparison: CAIDA's Geolocation Database Comparison", was presented at the 2011 Network Mapping and Measurement Conference (NMMC) to provide an introduction to geolocation comparison.
The accompanying technical report, "Geocompare: a comparison of public and commercial geolocation databases", was also presented at NMMC.
Request for Feedback
We are interested in public feedback on the general state of
geolocations and our evalution criteria.
If you can provide answers to the below questions, additional
questions we should be asking, or any other feedback, please send them to
geocompare-info@caida.org.
General Information Questions
- What is your primary interest in geolocation services?
Legal, academic, content localization, disaster preparedness, regulation, ... - Can you provide ground truth geolocation information for your
organization?
- Do you have suggested metrics, questions, or tests to include in the comparisons?
- If you provide a geolocation service, under what conditions would you be willing to participate?
- If you use a Geolocation service(s), which do you use and in what way?
- Which companies do you consider to be the primary providers of geolocation services at this time?
Geolocation Service Evaluation Criteria
- What geographic granularity does it provide?
Continent, country, state/prefecture, city, zip code. - What Internet identifier granularity does it support?
Internet Protocol (IP) address, network prefix, Autonomous System (AS). - Does the accuracy of the results vary by geographic region or by type of network?
- With what frequency does a service update its database?
- How many queries per second can clients execute?
Mailing Lists
| geocompare-info@caida.org | (to CAIDA) | please send your comments/questions to this email address. |
| geocompare-announce@caida.org | (from CAIDA) | sign up for announcements related to our geolocation comparison. |