Over the past couple of months, I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the importance of context in applications dealing with location. Dawn Nafus, an anthropologist at Intel, mentioned something similar in her recent keynote at OSCON. She said, “adding data is not the same as adding context.” The following snippet from an Intel blog post outlines the idea in a little more detail.
It was a huge accomplishment to simply be able to sense location electronically. Now that we’ve done it, it is important to figure out the real context of ‘context awareness’—who needs to communicate what to whom. This is not a matter of simply adding more datapoints but creating occasions for human interpretation and interaction. (Quoted from Research@Intel)
In my experience, it seems like too many applications focus on either the location (data) or the context without a really great tie between the two.
Here are a couple of examples to illustrate my point:
I publish that I am at the Peruvian restaurant, Andina. Does this mean that I’m having a romantic dinner with my sweetheart, or am I in the bar wishing someone would join me for a drink? I would want my friends to treat each of these two scenarios differently. While the location is the same, the intent and the context are very different. This is what I think of as location without context.
What about a tweet that says, “I’m at Urban Grind. Anyone want to join me for a work session?” This is a little more clear, but can be ambiguous without a precise location. Do you know if I am at the Urban Grind Coffeehouse in Portland’s Pearl District or the one in NE Portland? This is an example of context without location.
Why does this even matter?
The sweet spot for bringing people together in more meaningful ways is precise location with context for what you are doing at that location. This gives people an excuse to get together for spontaneous gathering, which is something that the Portland technology community does frequently. We’ve organized ad hoc co-working sessions, coffee, lunches, waffleups, happy hours, drunk geeking, and more. Having an easy way to provide your friends with a location and some context about what to do with that information is what makes location applications so powerful.