Bootstrapping the Location-enhanced Word Wide Web

Abstract

Our challenge to the research community is to make location-enhanced web services valuable and readily accessible to a very large number of people in daily, real world, situations. We envisage a global scale, multiorganization and interdisciplinary initiative, Place Lab, that will bootstrap the broad adoption of the location-enhanced Web. Our research collective is developing an open software base (providing low-cost private positioning technology) and fostering the formation of user and developer communities. Through individual Place Labs initially seeded on the campuses of universities, colleges, and research organizations this initiative will be a vehicle for research, instruction, collaboration and application sharing. This paper describes some of our first steps towards meeting this challenge. Keywords Location-aware; context-aware; ubiquitous; positioning systems; WiFi; GPS; web services; wireless hotspots; wardriving