The Non-spatial Internet
Hot Mobile News
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UK banking group Alliance and Leicester (A&L) is launching a mobile banking service in the new year that will run on the MoniLink network which was developed by IT services firm Morse and the Link Interchange Network.
One of the strengths of the Internet is the ability to make connections. Arthur can converse and exchange ideas with Betty halfway around the world. Indeed ‘halfway around the world’ has no meaning for them. The Internet has no spatial coordinates. Arthur and Betty could without knowing be in adjacent rooms and the experience would be identical.
This non-spatial characteristic of the Internet is surprisingly becoming more of a deficiency as the Mobile Web becomes a reality. Once you’re moving around, it is so often useful to know whether some person or facility you are dealing with may be close at hand or far-away. The W3C Mobile Web Initiative is promoting ways of ensuring that a ‘point’ on the Internet (a URI) is satisfactorily visible whatever the device, whether a Desktop PC or a mobile device such as a cell phone. However this Internet point does not exist in physical space. It exists only in cyber-space. In a sense it’s everywhere and it’s nowhere.
When you are dealing with knowledge or ideas, this non-spatial nature of the Internet is not a problem. However many human activities are linked to a particular physical location. Where is the nearest Indian restaurant? Is there a bookstore close to here? Where is the railway station? That is why local search is such a hot topic. All the search engines are competing intensively to deliver the best process.
The most popular approaches seem to involve maps. For example Google Local Search at local.google.com immediately shows you a map. 
Technically it’s quite mind-blowing given the power of satellite surveillance. However in some cases, it relates to a geographical point defined by latitude and longitude, which can be somewhat difficult to use for many people. It’s much more useful in many cases to have the physical address of a location. .. not least to find out on which side of the street a building may be located.
Trying to find the actual coordinates of a location can be difficult as pointed out in an excellent post yesterday by William Slawski entitled Assigning Geographic Locations to Web Pages. He reviews a Google patent that describes how to try to determine geographical data for web sites. It draws on all the related information that may be found in associated web pages on the Internet. It really is amazing what powerful computing methods can attempt to cover in trying to get the correct address for a particular establishment.
As Bill notes in that post, there are ways in which the data could be amplified.
- A search engine could manually assign locations to pages.
- A site owner could manually assign locations to pages.
- Geographic meta tags could be used.
- A search engine could look for postal addresses on the same pages as the other keywords in the query.
Some of these methods are currently used but they never seem to get enough popular acceptance to make them universal winners.
Of course whatever is proposed to handle this problem must work for Mobile Local Search since that likely will be the most popular Internet application. While thinking over this problem, a simple business card caused a light bulb to come on. Why shouldn’t a web page have a kind of virtual business card that gave the key contact coordinates? Thus was born the idea of a LURI (Location Uniform Resource Identifier).
Every web page (URI) would have its associated LURI. This would be a mini-web page that could display the contact coordinates even on a cell phone screen. The LURI would be set out according to some agreed standard so that a given line would be used for say the City in which the entity behind the website is located. Further details are given on the right under Basic Concepts and the idea will be elaborated in future posts.
Related:
Yellow Pages Tackles Local Search
Local Search On The World Wide Web
Tags: Mobile, local search, LURI
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BPWrap
December 17th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
[...] The first-click-through award goes to Barry Welford at StayGoLinks for “The Non-Spatial Internet” because any DIY Online Business for One needs to keep constant watch on online trends and developments, and Barry talks about a new notion that ties cyberspace to meat space, supporting the hot topic of local search. [...]
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:26 pm
[...] Barry Welford presents The Non-spatial Internet posted at StayGoLinks, saying, “Local Search is having extraordinary difficulties given that the Internet is non-spatial. Half-way around the world is as close as just down the street. The LURI, a mobile-device friendly way of showing geographical coordinates for a web page (URI), will help significantly in locating places you wish to visit.” [...]
May 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm
There certainly are a lot of connections being made because of the internet. And more and more are being introduced almost daily.
February 26th, 2009 at 2:41 am
Yes, the 2 main strengths as I see it is the ability to make connections and the easy and fast way to get information. How difficult was it not to get spatial information a decade ago and now a 7 year old can access to Google earth.
Showing geographical coordinates for a web page, this is interesting, the technology travels fast.