Building Location-Aware Web with SALT and Webnear.Me

Location Based Services (LBS) belong to the most popular type of mobile applications today. Most of the content in LBS has to be created from scratch and needs to be explicitly location-tagged, which makes existing web content not directly usable for LBS. In this paper we aim at making websites location-aware and feed this information to LBS. For this purpose we first present SALT, an engine that receives websites as input and equips them with location-tags. Compared to other approaches, SALT is capable of extracting locations with a precision up to the street level. While the engine basically works unsupervised, it is also capable to handle user-feedback to improve the results. Second, we present Webnear.me as a use case of SALT. Webnear.me offers location-aware web surfing through a mobile website. It displays nearby websites depending on: 1) the user's current location and 2) the currently visited website. Finally we show that our application has a high acceptance from users through a formative user study.