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Selected papers from the TERENA networking conference 2008
Edited by Diego R. Lopez [RedIRIS, Madrid, Spain]
1. Introduction
Context is the information that characterizes the situation and environment in which a computer is operating. One of the most important types of context information is location, which is a crucial ingredient in many ubiquitous computing applications. Knowledge of location makes it possible to reason what people are doing and what they are interested in, therefore, to determine what information to present and in what way. Development of positioning technologies and wide deployment of wireless networks have given rise to location-based services, which are predicted as the next mass-market opportunity for device manufacturers, network operators and content providers. Such applications provide users with services that are tailored to their locations. Most existent location-based applications are either standalone programs running on mobile devices or applications working in client-server mode. The majority lack generality, as they are designed to serve a particular purpose in a particular environment. Different applications require different software to be installed on a user's mobile device. As a consequence, the user has to maintain various location-based applications. There is a great need for a general solution. At present, the World Wide Web is the platform for communication, research, business and many other things. With no further software other than a standard web browser, users are able to access information from all over the world. Integrating location information into web systems enables users to use various location-based applications and services without installing extra software.
In this paper we propose the concept and the framework of a web-based tracking and guiding system - the Web-Based Guide, and describe its prototypical implementation. The typical application scenarios of the framework are in the local areas covered by WLAN (for data communication and positioning), such as campuses, botanical gardens, conferences, and museums. The paper is organized as follows. Section 2 gives a short review of the related work. Section 3 introduces the concept of web-based tracking and guiding and the relevant issues. Section 4 presents the framework of the Web-Based Guide. The prototypical application and its implementation are described in Section 5. Section 6 concludes the paper and presents directions for future work.
2. Related work
Tremendous research has been...