Location-based social network services employing student cards for university

Abstract

This study proposes a novel social networking service based on the locations of students. Since many existing social networking services do not consider the locations of users, in general, they can only support communication via the Internet. In order to acquire the locations of users and utilize them, the proposed system has the following functions. (1) It can acquire information regarding when and where the students are located by using both the attendance records of classes and the login records of educational computers. These records are automatically recorded by a student card mounted on a noncontact-type IC. (2) Since our system supports Web access from mobile phones, users can also access it from outdoors. Since these functions enable users to find the locations of friends in the vicinity anytime and anywhere without special terminals, we expect that our system can support communications not only via the Internet but also in the real world. Moreover, we have managed and evaluated this system as a Web service for over one year in our university.