Topics and Challenges
Theme
With simple global connectivity and a constantly dropping price for services and hardware, the 'Internet of Things' - the Internet connectivity of everyday objects- has become a reality. This means that computing systems are and will be 'surrounding' humans and also many entities such as pets, cars, goods, or household appliances - wherever we go, wherever we are, at all times. Independent of the discussion whether ubiquitous computing systems will be invisible or not, connected things will always be located somewhere. Internet-enabled things will typically have a physical reference to some place, where they are or where they offer their affordances/services to the world: Pets are moving around, we drive in our cars, goods are stored and transported, household appliances have their place and function at some place in the home. And they are forming the bridge to persons and things who and that are are located at some place. This location often is crucial important contextual information for the computing systems involved. In consequence, we will have more and more ubiquitous computing systems that will have to find, use, and visualize localized information. Applications increasingly embed location as fundamental means for providing information and interactive services to a user. The biggest source of potentially localized information is clearly the World Wide Web. Early papers in the Web context assume that 20 percent and more of the Web is content that is related to a physical location. The involved refers to location by tagging content with places and regions and of course objects, by adding GPS positions to user generated content. Beyond the more explicitly embedded localized content Web scale geo-content mining and mobile search are sources of relating the digital Web to physical locations and objects. This workshop aims to address the research questions and challenges at the border between the localized information wealth of the Web and the local ubiquitous computing systems.
Topics
Therefore we suggest the following topics. The authors are not limited to this list and focus on other topics relevant for the LocWeb community.
- Designing interaction for mobile users to interact with the environment
- Spatial awareness, location as context
- Sensing and applying user location for ubiquitous applications
- Beyond location - models for user mobility intention
- Analyzing mobility data to understand and predict users mobility behavior
- Ubiquitous search
- Extract and rank Web information on the basis of mobility detection of ``hot'' physical places from the Web
Challenges
The ubiquity of Web information becomes more and more possible as communities in geographic information retrieval are putting much effort into understanding location aspects in the unstructured Web. Also activities are there to make the more structured and semantic. Microformats are a small field but to be noted that tell about location aspects of Web content. The semantic Web activities and linked data will also aim to include location information. The same do new Web 2.0 sources such as Twitter which aims to make the location of the Tweet available.
The challenge is to
- mine spatio-temporal aspects of Web content and Web 2.0 content related to Internet-enabled things,
- prepare, index, filter the relevant content that matches the current and local information demand,
- prepare Web content such that it can augment the situation and provide a localized information sphere ``around'' things and humans,
- match the context of Internet-enabled things with localized Web content,
- exploiting Web knowledge for providing more targeted services to user/owners of things,
- make the Web accessible for a potentially mobile user, and to
- visualize on embedded displays, be it tiny or large, personal or shared displays.
