Enabling the "Internet of Places": a virtual structure of space-time-tasks to find and use internet resources

Abstract

The growing success of 3D spinning globes, navigation systems, and Location-Based Services (LBS) is promoting a profound paradigm shift, as people are becoming increasingly accustomed to accessing heterogeneous digital content in relation to real world locations --- be this place referred to within a tweet, the location of an incident as described by a news report, the various places where a video was filmed etc. In response to this, an increasing number of Web 2.0 mash-ups are available from the web offering specialized web-based solutions to access various types of information based on the position of events in the real world. Nevertheless, the lack of native spatial support at the web level precludes geographical or location-based contextualization of most digital resources available through the Internet. This paradigm shift has created the pre-conditions -at societal level- for spatio-temporal enablement of the Internet which should evolve from a paradigm based on the "Internet of Objects" to a new, spatio-temporally capable, "Internet of Places", made of natively spatio-temporally contextualized web-services. This paper presents a vision for the next generation of intelligent web-based applications capable of delivering context-aware and real-time access to large-data repositories, by providing overarching technology to organize, filter and explore Web content from every domain using the same intuitive user-driven and spatio-temporal metaphor. This paper tries to define a blueprint proposing protocols and data structures that could be used to reorient the web to change the key dimension for accessing and organizing resources, from the structure of Internet addresses to a more natural structure of space and time. According to this approach it would not matter where a resource is physically stored, but only whether it is relevant to a given user's task with respect to place and time. This is what we have called the "Internet of Places".