Geobrowsing is seeking and accessing information on the
Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
via a method that is reverse of the traditional
Web navigational path. Rather than navigating through a series of linear or
non-linear
In mathematics and science, a nonlinear system (or a non-linear system) is a system in which the change of the output is not proportional to the change of the input. Nonlinear problems are of interest to engineers, biologists, physicists, mathe ...
hyperlinks
In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference providing direct access to data by a user's clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with ...
, users browse content visually — typically on a map — similar to the way they think, and then navigate down to the textual information.
An example of this would be the confluence of "
points of interest
A point of interest (POI) is a specific point location that someone may find useful or interesting. An example is a point on the Earth representing the location of the Eiffel Tower, or a point on Mars representing the location of its highest ...
," the user's location and a virtual map coming together to allow the user to efficiently find what they are looking for within a specified radius from where they are standing. Other tenets of Geobrowsing include the user's presence and the presence of friends, the ability to interact among those friends and other contextual information.
Geobrowsing as a concept has its roots in
AOL
AOL (formerly a company known as AOL Inc. and originally known as America Online) is an American web portal and online service provider based in New York City, and a brand marketed by Yahoo! Inc.
The service traces its history to an online ...
, where it was prototyped in the late 1990s. Today,
XOHM is generally credited for pioneering initial demonstrations of Geobrowsing on its mobile
broadband
In telecommunications, broadband or high speed is the wide-bandwidth (signal processing), bandwidth data transmission that exploits signals at a wide spread of frequencies or several different simultaneous frequencies, and is used in fast Inter ...
network, now merged with Clear.
External links
*
*
*
World Wide Web
Web design
Telecommunications-related introductions in the 1990s
{{www-stub