Experiments with location-based content: Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Open Air
Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Learning Innovations has been looking at new ways of providing location-based content on mobile phones. Under the working title we've recently finished a demo website that combines events listings from the campaign Breathing Places with information from .
We first started looking at informal learning applications for mobile phones in 2004. At the time the technology was not widely available for any one of our ideas to become a reality. Skip forward to 2009 and not only can phones tell you where they are but on some newer phones this can all be done through the standard web browser.
The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Open Air demo uses the open source software offered by to find out your location and pass this back as a search term to find relevant local information. At the moment Gears is supported on all phones running the open source as well as newer handsets. It's also available as a plug-in for , , on desktops, laptops and netbooks.
If you have one of these newer phones with built-in Gears support you don't need to install any additional applications to find content for where you are. The Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Open Air demo is not like an , it's a standard web page you can visit from any browser. And as we appreciate not all users have the latest phones it should degrade elegantly and let you search by postcode or place name.
Providing location-based content has long been a chicken and egg problem. There's not much incentive for a content producer to new web pages when most search engines do very little with this extra detail. Similarly, there's not much incentive to create a pan-Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ site that enables users to search for content by location when there aren't many geotagged pages.
With we wanted to build a complete demo with a location-based search at one end backed up with some useful content at the other. We considered various datasets and decided on combining Breathing Places, encouraging people to get closer to nature, with a local Weather result, essential related information for anyone venturing outdoors.
The user proposition is simple: go to wherever you are and find the nearest relevant Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ content. At the moment that means the nearest places where you can get closer to nature but potentially we can add data from other learning campaigns or other bits of the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ. We've designed the site with this in mind:
The first results page will give one result from each data set. You can then select 'more like this' to see just one type of result sorted by distance, or you can select 'all local results' to see all types of result in one list (which will obviously make more sense as we add more types of data to the site). For any given result you can click on 'details' for further info and a link to the original data.
Building this demo allows us to test and demonstrate the technical feasibility of finding a location using the core capabilities of new mobile devices rather than having to develop bespoke applications that a user must install. We can also test the overall concept and interface on potential users.
We've run some trials, found some bugs that need fixing, and already have good ideas about what should come next. For one thing since we built the demo Apple have added geolocation to the Safari browser on the iPhone so we want to add support for this.
We're collating all the feedback we receive which will inform recommendations about the further development of the demo into a fully-scalable live service and the future development of similar websites and mobile services. Please give it a try and .
Dominic Tinley is a Development Producer for Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Learning Innovations
Comment number 1.
At 26th Aug 2009, Technicalfault wrote:Very cool - interested that you support Gears which has a lot of potential devices including desktops. It would be great if at some stage you could also support the location features in iPhone :-)
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Comment number 2.
At 26th Aug 2009, Dave Parker wrote:It would be nice to know where it thought my current location was, it seems to think I'm somewhere in London, rather than Somerset!
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Comment number 3.
At 26th Aug 2009, Up Your Ego wrote:Any plans to extend this to Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ Local? By the end of this year all 50+ local sites across England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and even Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man will be in the new system complete with rss feeds for every index - including Nature.
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