Location Awareness using GeoTagging
When choosing a product I believe our decision is largely based on price, whereas with a service location is a bigger deciding factor. Which is where GeoTagging could prove a big benefit to business and users alike. GeoTagging is when geographical information is added to metadata in websites, RSS feeds or images. This can be in the form of latitude and longitude coordinates, altitude, bearings or place names.
For example, I’m looking for a nearby Italian restaurant. I search for “Italian restaurants in Oxfordshire” and I’m given hundreds of results. I don’t want to travel the length of the county for a restaurant, I want the closest. I would therefore filter the results by nearby GeoTags.
As internet-enabled mobile devices become more widespread the potential for GeoTagging location-specific content is greater still. To change my example, I’m walking down the street with my iPhone and looking for a nearby Italian restaurant. I search for “Italian restaurant” and my results show the closest restaurant with directions generated by GoogleMaps. Firstly, my search criteria are sent with my location from my iPhone to a search engine. It is queried against GeoTagged data and the results are shown as directions from my current location generated in GoogleMaps. In the same way this could be applied to nearby “Tourist attractions”, specifying the location of where a photo was taken or finding concerts, shows or just about anything.
