Location Based Services (LBS) promise interesting business opportunities. Today, most LBS are either implemented in hardware devices, or downloaded and installed by mobile phone users as software applications. Both approaches lead to scattered markets and hinder standardization. This paper suggests an alternative approach, which is to enhance mobile web-browsers with location information and implement LBS at the server-side. We define the design space for the location enhanced mobile web and present an implementation of a location enhanced web browser for the currently predominant mobile phone operating system, i.e. Symbian S60.
While mobile apps for smartphones are consistently popular, the most common way for users to explore the Internet is still through the WWW. Websites are however not explicitly equipped with information regarding their location -an issue for use on mobile devices. With this work we aim at bridging this gap by adding a location layer to websites and letting users browse by nearby websites. We present a mobile demonstrator called Webnear.me. Once installed on the smartphone, users are able to list websites in proximity their location: Near.me. Websites in proximity to another one can be browsed too: Near.this. With our application we strive to give answers to the question of how web content should be tagged with locations. We approach this question with several content-and user-centric location-tagging methods.
Location-based services (LBS) belong to one of the most popular types of services today. However, a recurring issue is that most of the content in LBS has to be created from scratch and needs to be explicitly tagged to locations, which makes existing Web content not directly usable for LBS. In this paper, we aim at making Web sites location-aware and feed this information to LBS. Our approach toward location-aware Web is threefold: First, we present a location extraction method: SALT. It receives Web sites as input and equips them with location tags. Compared to other approaches, SALT is capable of extracting locations with a precision up to the street level. Performance evaluations further show high applicability for practice. Second, we present three applications for SALT: Webnear.me, Local Browsing and Local Facebook. Webnear.me offers location-aware Web surfing through a mobile Web site and a smartphone app. Local Browsing adds the feature to browse by nearby tags, extracted from Web sites delivered by SALT. Local Facebook extends location tagging to social networks, allowing to run SALT on one's own and one's friends' timeline. Finally, we evaluate SALT for technology acceptance of Webnear.me through a formative user study. Through real user data, collected during a 3 months pilot field deployment of Webnear.me, we assess whether SALT is a proper instance of ''location of a Web site''.
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