The World Wide Web was originally created as a web of connected documents. What if that’s no longer an appropriate, or sufficient, metaphor? A group of geospatial data specialists today published a call for a new web architecture that would supplant the Internet of Documents with a spatio-temporal Internet of Places.
Published on the geotechnology industry site Directions Magazine, the call to action is titled The “Internet of Places” and was authored by Giuseppe Conti, Raffaele De Amicis, Federico Prandi (of Israeli CAD software company Graphitech) and Paul Watson of 30+ year old UK-based data quality and integration services company 1Spatial. The authors say that the old “publication-search-retrieval? paradigm has been carried through the Web 2.0 era of social media but the web now needs to be updated in order to take into account the connection between online content and geographic location.
“A significant proportion of the content available on the Internet has a spatial dimension,” the authors argue.
As I stand here, where I am, there is a whole world of information that is relevant to this place. Right now that information and this place are not easy to connect.
For those who create and index the future of the web to connect the web and the places it could touch, from the outset of their activities, to create an Internet of Places instead of an internet of disembodied but connected documents, sounds like a very good idea.
“This may be either explicit or implicit, for instance a place name within a document or the location of a place referred to within a tweet. However, if we take a look from a geospatial standpoint at the various types of Internet resources and applications used today, we see a fairly fragmented picture…An increasing number of real-time sensor data feeds and an unprecedented amount of unstructured crowdsourced information now complements standard geospatial resources…
“Despite this added versatility, if we look carefully at the ‘low level’ infrastructure used by those Web 2.0 apps, we see that they are still based on the same simple dereferencing model whereby resources are published at precise network locations, typically defined through a URI; the recent advent of these Web 2.0 technologies and semantic tools has not essentially affected the classic ‘publication-search-retrieval’ paradigm. And, because the core Internet standards lack ‘native’ spatial support, the Web is very limited in its ability to deliver geographical or location-based contextualization of most digital resources available.
“…if we analyze the behavior of Internet users today, we observe a radical evolution in the way users are discovering information as they use platforms that provide access to resources without any explicit reference to their Internet or network location. Instead resources are accessed according to their geographical context or, in the case of LBS [Location Based Services], according to the physical location of the user.
“This radical paradigm shift is not simply a technical one; more importantly it is a cognitive one, affecting different social and age groups and it creates the pre-conditions, at societal level, for true spatio-temporal enablement of the Internet.”
The authors advocate a variety of new technological steps that could be taken to better serve geo-aware applications and their users, from changes in publishing to indexing to retrieval and display of information.
A number of possibilities are described, some a bit more proscriptive than suits my tastes. Abandoning the keyboard for 3D-augmented reality interfaces does not appeal to me, for example.
But I love the idea of publishing data with geo-data in mind right from the start. I also really like the idea of indexing the web of content with Place always in mind. Location may have felt like a bonus feature, a niche use case, at one point in the web’s history – but nearly ubiquitous web-connected mobile and other devices, as well as greatly reduced barriers to entry in publishing, could make Place a fundamental part of content online these days.
As I stand here, where I am, there is a whole world of information that is relevant to this place. Right now that information and this place are not easy to connect. For those who create and index the future of the web to connect the web and the places it could touch, from the outset of their activities, to create an Internet of Places instead of an internet of disembodied but connected documents, sounds like a very good idea.
Photo: Taking Time, by Nathan O’Nions
