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overview g
A riment
expe Labs
from HP
hpgloe.com
In this document we describe the HP Gloe service, a geo-tagging experiment
from HP Labs. The goal of this overview is to highlight the principal ideas behind
the service and to inspire users to take advantage of the available features more
effectively. The overview also presents a number of use cases showing how the
service may be used in practice, and encourages developers to build location-
aware services using the Gloe API.
HP GLOE • overview • 2
What is Gloe? How does the system itself work?
Gloe is a tool designed to answer the increasingly common Gloe is designed around a massively parallel backend where
question: How can I learn more about my current location? data is split across small regions or neighborhoods that can
Gloe’s general-purpose geo-tagging service connects Web be efficiently queried for all information in their vicinity. This
content to specific geographic locations, allowing users to privileges local search at the expense of global search not
discover helpful information that is contextualized by place. being supported in real-time, given that Gloe is designed to
Gloe aims to provide relevant, trusted Web content to users on deliver results on the basis of physical proximity.
the basis of a geographic context and user recommendation.
Empowered by Gloe, mobile Web users can explore locations Each link recommendation by a user is recorded as the
new and old, confident in their ability to access useful, URL, title, latitude-longitude coordinate, and a set of
relevant information. metatags submitted by the user. The recommendation feeds
are constructed by aggregating link recommendations within
How can I use Gloe? a region determined by a latitude-longitude epicenter and
Anyone who surfs the Web can recommend or attach Web a radius.
content that they find relevant to a given location. The Gloe
user community provides quality control by investing their How is Gloe’s unique recommendation
reputation via expenditures of their recommendation budget system designed?
on geo-tagged links they consider most relevant to the To ensure high-quality contributions, and to infer popularity
location. As a Gloe user, you can contribute to the experiment more accurately, all users in the system are granted a
by attaching and recommending content for a place. recommendation budget. This budget is spent when a user
makes recommendations in the system; each user specifies
The current proof-of-concept user interface for Gloe displays how much of their budget to spend on each recommendation.
a feed of recommendations featuring the most popular Web When the full budget has been expended, no further
content customized for a given location. The feed can also recommendations can be made until Gloe refreshes the
be filtered by channels, which are arbitrary hierarchical user’s budget.
categories, also determined by user-submitted metatags.
The aggregate budget spending on a link in a geographic
In an effort to automate the content discovery for users, region is the ultimate metric for popularity in Gloe, and it is
Gloe presents a popular channel feed, or a tag cloud, for what is used to determine the rank of recommendations.
the user’s current location to help them find relevant local
information. To further personalize the content, Gloe
supports the use of Facebook Connect to show users only
content recommended by their friends.
HP GLOE • overview • 3
Gloe is a general-purpose cloud service that can
be used on many different platforms and devices.
Gloe’s location-based link ranking function is built-in to the service, and can be used to discover relevant content based on
geographic location. Gloe also features a fully open API which is intended to spur the development of third-party applications
that make use of Gloe’s database of geo-tagged links in any number of innovative ways. Please see the API documentation
if you are interested in developing applications using Gloe.
HP GLOE • overview • 4
Summary
In an increasingly noisy mobile Web, Gloe’s massively scalable system is built to support
the rise of applications that filter and serve information to users based on their location.
Combined with a unique recommendation market and a simple developer API, Gloe promises
to be a platform that improves the usefulness of the mobile Web for the next generation
of users. The main goal is to make Web browsing in a mobile setting more effective by
automating contextual searches and leveraging social networks to discover geographically
relevant content.
As Web users continue to access the internet on mobile devices, the demand for location-
aware services will grow accordingly, and Gloe will provide the backbone for services to
find geographically relevant resources. Gloe arms you with the information that you need to
understand your surroundings and make informed choices, opening up the possibilities of an
increased awareness about your present location and allowing you to do more with greater
confidence. So where will you Gloe?
HP GLOE • overview • 5