Exploiting Context in Location-Based Information Systems

The area of mobile location-based information systems enumerates many systems that enable their users to digitally annotate physical locations, providing in this way information to others about these locations, communicating with other people in the proximity and publicly expressing their opinions and thoughts. However, no attempts have been made to facilitate the user in describing important situations through annotations and further on, to analyze the textual data provided in the annotations, in order to extract useful information and exploit this information for the benefit of others. We argue that these annotations could be proved critical, as long as the system exploits their content and the context. In this work we propose a mobile location-based annotation system with enhanced context-aware functionality, which enables users to textually annotate public spaces, mainly streets and squares, in order to inform users and authorities about hazardous circumstances, public issues and other important information.