Location Concepts for the Web

The concept of location has become very popular in many applications on the Web, in particular for those which aim at connecting the real world with resources on the Web. However, the Web as it is today has no overall location concept, which means that applications have to introduce their own location concepts and have done so in incompatible ways. On the other hand, there are a number of interfaces and techniques that make location information available to networked devices. By turning the Web into a location-aware Web location-oriented applications get better support for their location concepts on the Web, and the Web becomes an information system where location-related information can be more easily shared across different applications and application areas. This chapter describes a location concept for the Web supporting different location types and its embedding into some of the Web’s core technologies.