A method for locating a mobile device inside a building by using a plurality of reference areas in the building as satellites. A scan is obtained by the mobile device at an unknown location in the building. The scan includes a plurality of detected WAPs with a corresponding RSSI for each detected WAP. The method to improve accuracy of a semantic indoor positioning system by generating a vector of distance scores based on the scan for comparison with vectors of survey distance scores corresponding to the reference areas. The method includes arranging the detected WAPs into an ordered list, extracting a set of WAP tuples from the ordered list, retrieving a set of probabilities for each reference area, calculating a distance score for each reference area, generating the vector of distance scores, and comparing the vector of distance scores with each of the vectors of survey distance scores.