Mobile Spatially Aware Wiki: Theory and Application

IGERT Students

Date: Friday, May 19, 2006
Place: Humanities and Social Sciences, 1173
Time: 2:00 pm — 3:00 pm

Abstract:
“Wikis” compile online multimedia content using semantic organization. A tradi-tional wiki enables a user to input, edit, and tag online information. This open frame-work is becoming increasingly popular on the internet. For example, Wikipedia, a user-contributed encyclopedia, is one of the world’s busiest websites. Unfortunately, traditional wiki applications are limited to desktop computing environments. Members of our IGERT group share a common interest in extending the conceptual wiki framework to location-aware mobile devices. Our research goal is to “mobilize” wiki technologies to enable users to view, search, contribute, edit, and tag relevant online content in mobile computing environments, to evaluate the usability of this system, and to explore its relevance to research in spatial cognition. We are motivated by a few different applications (mentioned below) that diverge in terms of their intended purpose and users. Yet the underlying architecture is the same and involves the same set of problems (listed be-low). By applying the principles from our interdisciplinary backgrounds, we intend to create and evaluate a mobile location-aware system that makes user-contributed con-tent accessible and relevant to people in the real world, not just those sitting at bulky computers. The results of this project should thus be relevant to both end-users and the research community.

The WIKI research group:
Drew Dara-Abrams, Psychology Trainee
Kirk Goldsberry, Geography Associate
Brent Hecht, Geography Trainee
John Roberts, Computer Science Trainee
Nicole Starosielski, Film Studies Associate
Prof. Keith Clarke, Geography Faculty Advisor
Prof. Mary Hegarty, Psychology Faculty Advisor
Prof. Tobias Hollerer, Computer Science Faculty Advisor