[Research] People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places

In the CSCW Journal, People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems by Jones, Sukeshini, Gandhi, Terveen and Whittaker., there is an interesting discussion of location based annotation systems. They coin the term People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places to refer to those systems.

In this paper we examine an emerging class of systems that link People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places; we call these P3-Systems. Through analyzing the literature, we have identified four major P3-System design techniques: People-Centered systems that use either absolute user location (e.g. Active Badge) or user proximity (e.g. Hocman) and Place-Centered systems based on either a representation of people’s use of physical spaces (e.g. ActiveMap) or on a matching virtual space that enables online interaction linked to physical location (e.g. Geonotes). In addition, each feature can be instantiated synchronously or asynchronously. The P3-System framework organizes existing systems into meaningful categories and structures the design space for an interesting new class of potentially context-aware systems. Our discussion of the framework suggests new ways of understanding and addressing the privacy concerns associated with location aware community system and outlines additional socio-technical challenges and opportunities.