Toward location-aware Web: extraction method, applications and evaluation

Abstract

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''.