The concept of geographic relevance

Abstract

INTRODUCTION The almost ubiquitous access to geographic information has become a commodity owing to affordable and powerful mobile devices, widespread availability of mobile network connectivity, provision of spatial data sets, and services built upon them. Such mobile services employing geographic information, for instance location-based services (LBS) or mobile traffic and tourism related services are increasingly developed and deployed. The acceptance and success though is still lagging behind expectations for different reasons (Reichenbacher 2009). The main hindering factor is the lack of utility due to information mismatch, inadequacy or irrelevance of information and unsatisfying usability because the presentation of information is not adapted to the mobile Internet and designed according to cognitive principles. Missing in the majority of mobile services, including LBS is a broad and comprehensive and theoretically grounded concept of relevance. Although relevance has been studied for long in information science with respect to information retrieval, it has not been investigated under a geographic perspective that is indispensable if dealing with geographic information relevance. Such a notion of relevance is proposed here and termed geographic relevance.