Location aware web access

Abstract: The user's mobile communication device has an increasing sense of where the user is. This location information may be very fine grained or very coarse. Given some amount of location information it is possible to create location aware services. This thesis presents and evaluates a system for location aware web browsing. Indoors the user can click on a point on a map (to establish a virtual location using a previously installed user application), outdoors the location can be provided by GPS, or the location might be provided by some other location system (indoors or outdoors), then each HTTP GET request for a URL will be augmented with information about the user's location or their virtual location. Subsequently a web query is created. Then the location information encoded as longitude and latitude is appended to this web query. The web server uses this location information to generate dynamically location aware web pages. Finally a web browser shows the web pages.