Geospatial Semantic Web Blog

A question that most parents with teenage children often ask is “where are you?”. To help to answer this question, wireless service providers begin to offer location-based services that allow parents to monitor the whereabouts of their children on home computers.

To determine the location of a cellphone user, a service makes use of wireless signals from the cellphone. Based on the cellphone’ signal strength, the service is able to compute the relative position of the user from a group of cell towers. Knowing the geographical location of the user’s cellphone (i.e., a latitude/longitude value pair), the service then perform “reverse geocoding” to determine the location of the user.

In theory, the service works. In practice, however, there is a problem that was quite unexpected. Here is the problem:
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Blutooth MediaServer is a location-based system that distributes advertising via Bluetooth. Access Points of the Bluetooth MediaServer are typically placed in high-traffic locations such as restaurants, movie theaters and shopping malls. Upon entering the vicinity of these Access Points, customers who carry active Bluetooth devices (e.g., cellphones and PDA) will automatically receive targeted advertising messages.

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These days it seems like everyone has a camera phone, and everyone posts photos on Flickr. Wouldn’t it be great if photos taken on your camera phone can be automatically tagged with location information and then published onto Flickr?

Check out ZoneTag.

ZoneTag can automatically tag your photos with the location, based on the cell tower, in which they were taken. ZoneTag is known to work on 6620, 6670, 6680, 6681, 6682, 7610 models, and it is likely to work on 3230, 6630, 6260 as well

Of course, it has some limitation.

The location of the cell tower is not known until our user community updates the city, state, or zip code of their photos on Flickr.

I don’t have a Symbian phone, so I can’t try it out. If anyone has a chance to play with this software, please let me know what you think.