Location based context awareness through tag-cloud visualizations

People often only see what that they already know or explicitly look for. Thus, while mobile users might be interested in the historic background of their surrounding, its current significance or its relation to specific events, they are likely to miss places of interest if they are not explicitly pointed out. Location based services (LBS) like mobile tourist guides offer a potential technological solution, but the production cost of multimedia content is prohibitive in many cases, limiting the coverage of such services to major tourist areas. To provide mobile users with information on the spatial context of a location or a route we present an approach that gathers context information from freely available sources like Wikipedia and creates visualizations of this data that provide users with the necessary cues to increase awareness of their spatial context. In our approach we first gather geo-referenced information that is located close to a point or route. In the second step this data is filtered to extract key-words that characterize the environment. These are then rendered as a tag-cloud in the third step. By skimming the tag-clouds a user gets a good impression of the characteristic features of an environment and in essence performs a further filtering step. The user can interactively adjust the level of detail of the visualization or follow up on individual key-words to adjust the presentation to his interests. By combining web 2.0 technologies and public data sources with filtering and visualization techniques we exploit the browsing capability of humans to provide a service that increases location awareness at arbitrary locations. The approach makes it easy to author an additional text and it can incorporate the ever increasing amount of available geo-referenced information