One of the cooler things we’re working on at the moment is location awareness for our web applications. This lets us do useful things, like adjust page content based on where you are. The new Room Bookings system, for example, will detect your campus and automatically set your default location accordingly. Even things like the new Library service (“Jerome”) will be able to intelligently change things like library contact details and opening times based on where you are.
Give it a go. Visit http://location.ll.tn-uk.net/ from anywhere on campus (either wired or wirelessly) and it should tell you where you are. Sorry that it doesn’t look too pretty, but it’s basically a testing front-end to an API service we’re cooking up.
Very excited about the possibilities of this one.
I can see applications for the library – particularly if we can leverage some of our own data about where a student / l-user should be – i.e. their expected ‘home’ campus.
Then, we could emphasise/suppress the various aspects of the service such as inter-campus delivery, postal services for distance learners, e-library, SCONUL access, or plain old IOTS-GIY.
Paul
(It’s on the shelves – get it yourself.)
Take a look at the new version (http://location.ll.tn-uk.net), more specifically the source code. It’s that easy to build location services, and the geo library will be built into the CWD core as of 2.3. No more excuses for “If you’re on campus x…” type pages.