SerPens: a tool for semantically enriched location information on personal devices

Current mobile phones provide GSM cell information and many devices also support GPS or WiFi-based location information. A problem with raw location data is that it does not provide semantic information, which makes it hard to integrate location-awareness into applications. Moreover, to understand what kind of location information is important to users, researchers currently need to perform time consuming user studies. In this paper we introduce SerPens, a tool that enables gathering semantically enriched location information on personal devices. The main novelty of SerPens is that it enables users to share and gather semantic information in a collaborative fashion. The label information is tied to a taxonomy and is accessible to applications. SerPens has been developed on top of BeTelGeuse, a Bluetooth-based data gathering tool for J2ME compatible devices.