UrbanWeb: a platform for mobile context-awaresocial computing

UrbanWeb is a novel Web-based context-aware hypermedia platform. It provides essential mechanisms for mobile social computing applications: the framework implements context as an extension to Web 2.0 tagging and provides developers with an easy to use platform for mobile context-aware applications. Services can be statically or dynamically defined in the user's context, data can be precached for data intensive mobile applications, and shared state supports synchronization between running applications such as games. The paper discusses how UrbanWeb acquires cues about the user's context from sensors in mobile phones, ranging from GPS data, to 2D barcodes, and manual entry of context information, as well as how to utilize this context in applications. The experiences show that the UrbanWeb platform efficiently supports a rich variety of urban computing applications in different scales of user populations.

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