What is Location Awareness Systems

The popularity of mobile computing creates new opportunities for information sharing and collaboration through technologies like radio frequency identification (RFID) tags and location awareness technologies. This chapter discusses how these technologies, which provide subtly different information, can be used together toward increased benefit to users. This work introduces technologies for RFID and location awareness, including a survey of projects. We describe advantages of combining these technologies, illustrated through our system, TagIt, that uses these technologies in a traditional research poster environment to provide a rich multimedia experience and encourage ongoing feedback from poster viewers. An overview of TagIt is provided, including user commenting and information sharing capabilities that make use of RFID and location information. User feedback and an expert review highlights how TagIt could benefit authors, information consumers, and the research community, leading to future directions for the research community.