Retrieving Regional Information from Web by Contents Localness and User Location

Abstract

As use of the World Wide Web (WWW) and mobile devices spreads and becomes more advanced, people are increasingly able to use mobile devices, such as cell phones, to access various kinds of local information through the Internet for use in daily activities. Conventional mobile information services focus on providing location information related to the user’s current location. In contrast, we propose an information retrieval method that searches for ’local information’ pertaining to a wider geographic region. In this paper, we consider local information to be the kind of information that is of interest only to users within certain regions or organizations. From this perspective, ’local information’ differs from location information. Moreover, we are interested in searching for local information pertaining to a wider region (an area) that extends beyond a specific location (a place). Our local information retrieval method includes three stages: 1) searching for information using a query generated with user location data and keywords, 2) mapping the content coverage of searched Web pages onto the user’s current region, and 3) ranking the regional information based on the notion of localness degree.

This research is partly supported by the Special Research Area’s Grant In Aid For Scientific Research(2) for the year 2004 under the project title “Research for New Search Service Methods Based on the Web’s Semantic Structure” (Project No: 16016247, Representative: Katsumi Tanaka) and The Scientific Research Fund Foundation (A)(2) for the year 2004 under the project title Multi-modal Searches, Views on Mobile Content,and the Generation of Broadcasting Contenth(Project No: 14208036, Representative: Katsumi Tanaka), the Japanese Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology.