[Geowanking] ***Location Linked Information***

[Matt Mankins]

Hello...

LLI could be said to be an outgrowth of my work at Vert.  While 
technically the two systems are quite different (one is a closed content 
distribution system and the other is an open, growable infrastructure for 
hanging location content) LLI attempted to give the programmer something 
to start with when creating location-apps--something I longed for while 
at Vert.  

As many of you have found out, rolling your own location app can be fun 
and rewarding, but it takes so much time that in the long run it's not 
practical for every application.  LLI set out to create an infrastructure 
that would make the creation of location apps mundane.  (of course this 
hasn't quite happened, but that is where this project is heading.)  

More importantly, LLI set a way so that everyone's location apps could
start to talk with each other.  It allowed for content for a single
location to be distributed across many servers.  Content entry then 
happened bottom up, similar to the web's content entry mechanism.

I'd be happy to go into any details of the system, but perhaps that's for 
another venue.

Before I go, however, I should cover up two factual inconsistencies in a
previous post:

1) Tim Berners-Lee was technically my reader for the project.  He provided 
a wealth of insight into creating massively distributed systems (as you 
might imagine) and tried unsuccessfully to get me to redo the whole thing 
in RDF. :)  However he was not my adviser.  That honor goes to William J. 
Mitchell whose vision of the city inspired the work.

2) In my proposal I thought that the .geo way was the way to go...that is, 
assign specific servers a predefined geographic location.  In doing the 
research I came to a different conclusion: let every server store any 
location packet they want--just order servers by bounding boxes so you 
don't search the entire globe.

Happy geowanking,

Mankins

On Tue, 18 Nov 2003, Sonny Parafina wrote:

> I haven't read the thesis yet, but I met Matt several years ago. Matt was
> one of the founders of Vert (www.vert.net), a startup that delivered
> location and time sensitive advertising around the Boston area.  Cool to see
> what he is up to.
> 
> sonny
>   -----Original Message-----
>   From: geowanking-admin at lists.burri.to
> [mailto:geowanking-admin at lists.burri.to]On Behalf Of Mike Liebhold
>   Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2003 12:17 PM
>   To: geowanking at lists.burri.to
>   Subject: [Geowanking] ***Location Linked Information***
> 
> 
>   MIT Media lab Masters candidate, Matthew Mankin's Masters thesis,
> 'Location Linked Information ' [pdf]
>   describes a very well thought out demonstration of an architecture for
> ubiquitious information services based on xml streams within emerging IETF
> standard Jabber protocols.  Server cells cover explicit geographic areas,
> but users are authenticated at, and all infomation is routed through 'Home'
> servers thereby offering some privacy protection. Since the information
> distribution model is publish-subscribe, potential spammers can only pollute
> their own servers. There's an interesting community filtering capability
> too.
>