LiveCampus

What is the location-aware-browsing role in the project and how it would contribute to facilitate user interaction with the system?

It should be remembered that finding information online today is getting easier than ever.. thanks to search engines that index and sort global information, by crawling the web 24/7. There is lots of discussion/knowledge about how to optimize site’s content for good/relevant search rankings (i.e. see SEO). Location is just one more aspect that a ranking algorithm would consider to provide a search result. However we explore location information from a different perspective.

Despite the recent advances in mobile platforms to access the web, there is a remarkable trade-off to be considered: the lighter, smaller and more portable the device the more constrained the user interface is –all the way from Laptops to net-books to smart-phones.

One of the purposes of this project is to explore how location assisted browsing would impact user navigation experience.  Thus, in this context, we explore how the granularity of the location information provided would help ease the user interaction by automatically contextualizing browsing activities.

As previously discussed, in our experiments the location information is conveniently provided via the Wi-Fi campus infrastructure and a location broker provided by the DSI Research Group.

When a user accesses this website from within the campus,  its device’s network card is associated with an AP in the network. The location of this AP is known by the location broker service available at a given local url. The basic idea is then use that information to aid in browsing the site content.

The simple approach we propose is to have the user optionally point its browser to that known local url and let the broker redirect the petition to a specific link within this site. Such link would be a category or virtual repository associated with the location in question. The effective location granularity is to be determined. It could be the school of engineering, the bar or the “cantine” or maybe a building block.

As we will propose for many other issues in this project, the easier way to determine the appropriate granularity is to let the users them-self find out what is relevant and convenient. This requires to let the use patterns evolve so we can identify relevant location distinctions and thus group AP in relevant clusters, each of which will be associated with a corresponding section in the site.

A very similar approach is to be implemented to equally aid in choosing a posting category or section. It would be chosen automatically based on the url path used to reach the posting form, e.g. which section did the user came from to post? –which is ultimately linked to location.

More technical details of the location broker side implementation to be discussed later.