Leveraging the Web for a Distributed Location-aware Infrastructure for the Real World

Since GPS receivers have become a commodity anyone could access and use location information simply and freely. Such an easy access to ones’ location is instrumental to development of location-aware applications. However, existing applications are static in that they do not model relations between places and mobile things. Moreover, these applications do not allow to easily map the physical location of mobile devices to virtual resources on the Internet. We attempt to bridge this gap by extending the base concepts that make up the Internet with the physical location of devices, in order to facilitate the development of Web-based location-aware applications for embedded mobile devices. In this chapter, we propose a simple infrastructure for the "Web of Things" that extends the existing Web to enable location-aware applications. The proposed solution enables a naturally hierarchic way to search for location-aware devices and the services they provide.