Geotracker: geospatial and temporal RSS navigation

ABSTRACT

The Web is rapidly moving towards a platform for mass collaboration in content production and consumption. Fresh content on a variety of topics, people, and places is being created and made available on the Web at breathtaking speed. Navigating the content effectively not only requires techniques such as aggregating various RSS-enabled feeds, but it also demands a new browsing paradigm. In this paper, we present novel geospatial and temporal browsing techniques that provide users with the capability of aggregating and navigating RSS-enabled content in a timely, personalized and automatic manner. In particular, we describe a system called GeoTracker that utilizes both a geospatial representation and a temporal (chronological) presentation to help users spot the most relevant updates quickly. Within the context of this work, we provide a middleware engine that supports intelligent aggregation and dissemination of RSS feeds with personalization to desktops and mobile devices. We study the navigation capabilities of this system on two kinds of data sets, namely, 2006 World Cup soccer data collected over two months and breaking news items that occur every day. We also demonstrate that the application of such technologies to the video search results returned by YouTube and Google greatly enhances a user.s ability in locating and browsing videos based on his or her geographical interests. Finally, we demonstrate that the location inference performance of GeoTracker compares well against machine learning techniques used in the natural language processing/information retrieval community. Despite its algorithm simplicity, it preserves high recall percentages.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Information browsers

General Terms:
Algorithms, Experimentation, Human Factors, Languages, Measurement

Keywords:
RSS, blog, geospatial tagging, multimedia