RADAR – Potentials for Supporting Urban Development with a Social Geocontent Hub

1 ABSTRACT In recent years, a plenitude of mobile services is being developed and used that aim to offer access t o relevant information based on a user’s location. Th ese services – usually referred to as augmented rea lity services – allow for new ways to supplement and enh ance urban development processes, and they offer ne w means to exchange knowledge and to foster innovatio n. Yet, the task of providing information for such services is complex, and there’s no uniform contrib u ion process that can be applied for the different tools. Thus, content provision is restricted to only few e xp rts, and knowledge exchange between services is hardly possible at all. These facts hinder an adoption of augmented reality services by a larger user communi ty, and they have a negative impact on the realisation of s cenarios aiming to exploit the potentials of augmen ted reality services. We will present the RADAR system that realises an open infrastructure to man age and aggregate arbitrary location-dependent multimedia f rom different sources like the Social and Semantic Web or digital repositories. It provides an own mobile c ient for personalised information delivery, but c ontents can also be used within existing augmented reality services like Layar, Wikitude or ALOQA. Especially in the field of spatial planning, interesting use case s arise. The possibility to make planned future sta te of the built environment “tangible” right on spot – in the form of images, documents and three-dimensional mo dels – opens up new ways of informing citizens. Also, be cause of its facilities to easily contribute user g nerated content, RADAR offers a variety of opportunities to foster civic participation.