The Web Around The Corner: Augmenting the Browser with GPS

As programmable mobile devices (such as high-end cellular phones and Personal Digital Assistants) became widely adopted, users ask for Internet access on-the-road. While upcoming technologies like UMTS and Wi-Fi provide broadband wireless communication, Web services and Web browsers do not provide any sort of location-awareness yet. As GPS receivers get cheaper, positioning devices will be embedded into commercial mobile devices. Thus, the position of the user can be used to filter and tailor the information presented to the user as already done for language preferences and user-agent.This paper describes early results of an ongoing project called GPSWeb, which aims to provide GPS support for Web browsers and an application model for Location-Based Services. It introduces the Location-Based Browsing concept that enhances the classic Webuser-Website interaction.