There’s an existing “where am I” application database available throgh a couple of existing tools, some of which are mostly closed systems, and some that have APIs.

Plazes does the access point to location mapping, and there’s pretty good existing coverage of Ann Arbor.
Google Maps for Blackberry does cell tower location, but it’s super iprecise, so you know where you are within a few blocks and not much better.

The Getty Museum did a geolocation system using wifi and was really unhappy with the results - here’s a survey article with the state of the art 2005 results in museum applications:

http://www.archimuse.com/publishing/ichim05/Proctor.pdf

You could look at Yellow Arrow which uses stickers to be the access point IDs:

http://yellowarrow.net/index2.php

Happy to think about this more, there’s quite a bit of prior art to be inspired by and to improve on.

thank you for your comment. An important point on our plan for the database was to incorporate as much external location information as possible. Source that we considered were for example Wikimapia and also the Arborwiki (although so far I only knew it existed and not many details). So we would interested in talking about how we could make the two systems work together.

In terms of the “where am I?” question we actually abandoned RFID as the technical focus of our design. Our prototype will now probably be based on Bluetooth. But we will keep on looking at other possible technologies (GPS, 802.11, Wifi triangulation, ….) and try to keep our design as open as possible so that the “where am I?” question could be answered by multiple methods. And actually the question in our design is more like “what am I passing right now?” or “what am i standing in front of?”. Primarily, we don’t want to give to much information to the user about what is near, but only the one location that he is close to at this point.

In any case we are very much looking forward to cooperate with your project.

http://arborwiki.org

It has the right level of detail about the city (1000+ pages), and many of them are geocoded with locations already; it has reviews and information about businesses, and some level of street and pedestrian level navigation organized.

That could collapse the design down quite a bit:

* where am i?
* locate pages in the wiki that are near that spot
* list them by name to the user
* select one by name, and then read it to the user

As to the “where am I?” question, an additional data source you might use beyond RFID is to triangulate location based on the SSID of available wifi access points. In downtown Ann Arbor you can use the Wireless Washtenaw access points as where-am-i beacons, and then use cafes as wayfinding tools to go from place to place. No need really then to deploy special RFIC chips when the wifi infrastructure already gives you transmissions you can tune into.