Stamps - Location Based Social Tagging

Filed in archive Mobile Community on March 15, 2006

Smartmobs has pointed us in the direction of a geotagging research project at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne called System for TAgging Messages, Post-Inferential Semantics or STAMPS.

This work targets specifically a human activity that we defined as Collaborative Annotations of a Map in a mobile setting. In general, this can be seen as a form of `Spatialised' communication, which means that communication makes explicit usage of the geographical/physical context as referent to the message content. The goal of this study is to develop modeling schemas that enable to integrate spatial information, as embedded in maps, with the textual information produced through computer-mediated communication. Therefore the expected outcome of this study is twofold: on one end we plan to find a computational description of space using the annotations of the space inputed by the users (and viceversa); on the other end, we are planning to proof the goodness of such description through an applied verification.

The basic premise is to allow people to 'tag' their current location with information about th location, such as comments on local services or restaurants. This looks like an interesting application of location services, as it will allow customers to leave comments about the businesses they use.