Social web applications in the city: a lightweight infrastructure for urban computing

In this paper, we describe an infrastructure for browsing and multimedia blogging of Web-based information anchored with physical places in an urban environment. The infrastructure is generic in the sense that it may use any means such as GPS, RFID or 2D-barcodes as ubiquitous links anchors to anchor Web-based information, blogs, and services in the physical environment. The infrastructure is inspired from earlier work on open hypermedia, in the sense that the anchoring and blogging functionality can be integrated to augment arbitrary Web sites providing information that is relevant to places or objects in the physical world. The blog and anchor functionality is implemented as a set of Web services running on a server external to the content server. Experiences and design issues from three cases are discussed, which use Semacode-based physical anchoring to support lightweight urban Web applications.