The Location Graph: Towards a Symbolic Location Architecture for the Web

In this paper we outline a unified architecture for representing locations of people, places and things in real or virtual worlds, called realms, on the web. Our architecture is based on the location graph that encodes web-level containment and connectedness relationships between locations. The architecture provides an information processing model that allows realm independent queries such as position, range and path, and realm specific queries, such as distance. We present existing systems that are enablers for the proposed architecture. With this architecture we enable a common way to develop location based services and applications across real or virtual realms, avoiding fragmentation.