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overview g
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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.

Introduction Internet & American Life, 2009), and they

Because of the distributed network foundation
of the Web, connected users can access and
create new content from almost anywhere
with ease. As the Web has grown over the
years, this incredible explosion of information
has led to the rise of the search engine to
help users make sense of the enormous
volume of information contained on the
network. Search engines provide relevant
results to keyword-based queries that help
users find the information they seek.
In the present day, users are increasingly
accessing the Web from mobile devices such
as laptops, smartphones and netbooks (Pew
often search for information that relates to
their current location (Compete.com, 2009).
Most traditional methods of Web content
discovery, however, were not specifically
designed to return results for a query based
on physical location.
Taking a new approach to this demand for
location-based information, Gloe employs
a user-recommendation model for attaching
contextually relevant Web content to a
specific place with the goal of providing
helpful information that correlates to a given
position on the planet.

HP GLOE • overview • 2
What is Gloe?
Gloe is a tool designed to answer the increasingly common
question: How can I learn more about my current location?
Gloe’s general-purpose geo-tagging service connects Web
content to specific geographic locations, allowing users to
discover helpful information that is contextualized by place.
Gloe aims to provide relevant, trusted Web content to users on
the basis of a geographic context and user recommendation.
Empowered by Gloe, mobile Web users can explore locations
new and old, confident in their ability to access useful,
relevant information.
How can I use Gloe?
Anyone who surfs the Web can recommend or attach Web
content that they find relevant to a given location. The Gloe
user community provides quality control by investing their
reputation via expenditures of their recommendation budget
on geo-tagged links they consider most relevant to the
location. As a Gloe user, you can contribute to the experiment
by attaching and recommending content for a place.
The current proof-of-concept user interface for Gloe displays
a feed of recommendations featuring the most popular Web
content customized for a given location. The feed can also
be filtered by channels, which are arbitrary hierarchical
categories, also determined by user-submitted metatags.
In an effort to automate the content discovery for users,
Gloe presents a popular channel feed, or a tag cloud, for
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.
Gloe answers the question:
What web content is relevant to my location?
How does the system itself work?
Gloe is designed around a massively parallel backend where
data is split across small regions or neighborhoods that can
be efficiently queried for all information in their vicinity. This
privileges local search at the expense of global search not
being supported in real-time, given that Gloe is designed to
deliver results on the basis of physical proximity.
Each link recommendation by a user is recorded as the
URL, title, latitude-longitude coordinate, and a set of
metatags submitted by the user. The recommendation feeds
are constructed by aggregating link recommendations within
a region determined by a latitude-longitude epicenter and
a radius.
How is Gloe’s unique recommendation
system designed?
To ensure high-quality contributions, and to infer popularity
more accurately, all users in the system are granted a
recommendation budget. This budget is spent when a user
makes recommendations in the system; each user specifies
how much of their budget to spend on each recommendation.
When the full budget has been expended, no further
recommendations can be made until Gloe refreshes the
user’s budget.
The aggregate budget spending on a link in a geographic
region is the ultimate metric for popularity in Gloe, and it is
what is used to determine the rank of recommendations.
HP GLOE • overview • 3
 Gloe is a general-purpose cloud service that can
be used on many different platforms and devices.

I’m a developer, how can I use Gloe?

Gloe is designed as an open-ended general purpose cloud service that can be used on many different platforms. Currently
Gloe clients are available for all major desktop Web browsers (Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer, Chrome). Gloe also
has native apps for Android and RIM/BlackBerry, and the service can be accessed via Web browsers on other mobile 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.

Some example applications of the Gloe API include:

Local Business/Point of Interest Search Virtual Tours

Use Gloe’s geo-tagged links to discover
relevant local businesses and points of
interest for your present location.
Personal Bookmarking
Attach bookmarks with location-aware geo-
tags to establish a relationship between the
bookmarked content and a specified place.
Display relevant historical or cultural
resources for tourists and others.
Create a Web Page
Gloe can provide an interactive platform for
discussion and recommendation for locations
that do not have an existing Web presence
(e.g. a small park or a taco truck).

Social Search Ask the Locals

Discover geo-tagged recommendations that
friends have shared via Facebook Connect
integration.
Geographic Polls
Connect a poll or survey to a specific location
and collect responses from users in the vicinity
of that place.
Users in a given location can post geo-
tagged notes with questions or observations
about local subjects and receive responses or
recommendations from others in the vicinity.
Local News
Geo-tagged news stories can provide
“relevant information for local audiences.

Classified Ads Lifecasting

Target classified ads to potential customers Users can share their activities and
within a target neighborhood. experiences by geo-coding them to the
location where they occurred.

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?

The main goal is to make Web browsing in a mobile setting

more effective by automating search and leveraging social
networks to discover geographically relevant content.

To learn more about HP Labs, visit http://hpl.hp.com.

HP GLOE • overview • 5