Object hyperlinking - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Object hyperlinking is a neologism that usually refers to extending the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

to objects and locations in the real world. The current Internet does not extend beyond the electronic world. Object hyperlinking aims to extend the Internet to the real world by attaching object tags with URL

Uniform Resource Locator

In computing, a uniform resource locator or universal resource locator is a specific character string that constitutes a reference to an Internet resource....

s as meta-objects to tangible objects or locations. These object tags can then be read by a wireless mobile device and information about objects and locations retrieved and displayed.

However, object hyperlinking may be senseful in other context than with the Internet, e.g. with data objects in data base administering or with text content management

Content management

Content management, or CM, is the set of processes and technologies that support the collection, managing, and publishing of information in any form or medium. In recent times this information is typically referred to as content or, to be precise, digital content...

System components

Linking an object or a location to the Internet is a more involved process than linking two web pages. An object hyperlinking system requires seven components -

A virtual or physical object tag to identify objects and locations. Some tagging systems are described below. To allow the object tags to be located they must be physically embedded in visual markers. For example, the Yellow arrow
Yellow arrow
Yellow Arrow is a global public art project in that began in New York, New York but has now spread globally. Yellow arrow stickers can be obtained from their website and placed anywhere in the public realm. When encountering a sticker on the street, one can send the unique code printed on it as a...

scheme [see below] prints SMS
Short message service
Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...

tags on large adhesive yellow arrows, which can then be stuck on buildings etc.
A means of reading physical tags, or locating virtual tags.
A mobile device such as a mobile telephone, a PDA
Personal digital assistant
A personal digital assistant , also known as a palmtop computer, or personal data assistant, is a mobile device that functions as a personal information manager. Current PDAs often have the ability to connect to the Internet...

or a portable computer.
Additional software for the mobile device.
A commonly open wireless network, such as the existing 2G
2G
2G is short for second-generation wireless telephone technology. Second generation 2G cellular telecom networks were commercially launched on the GSM standard in Finland by Radiolinja in 1991...

and 3G
3G
3G or 3rd generation mobile telecommunications is a generation of standards for mobile phones and mobile telecommunication services fulfilling the International Mobile Telecommunications-2000 specifications by the International Telecommunication Union...

networks, for communication between the portable device and the server containing the information linked to the tagged object.
Information on each linked object. This information could be in existing WWW pages, existing databases of price information etc., or have been specially created.
A display to view the information on the linked object. At the present time this is most likely to be the screen of a mobile telephone.

Tags and tag readings systems

There are a number of different competing tagging systems.

RFID tags

A radio frequency identification device (also known as an 'Arphid') is a small transponder which can be read at short range by a transceiver (reader). Since RFID tags can be very small, they are often embedded in a more visible marker to allow them to be located.

A RFID reader can be added to an existing mobile telephone as a shell. Nokia

Nokia

Nokia Corporation is a Finnish multinational communications corporation that is headquartered in Keilaniemi, Espoo, a city neighbouring Finland's capital Helsinki...

produce such a shell for their 3220

Nokia 3220

The Nokia 3220 is a GSM, Nokia Series 40 mobile phone. The Nokia 3220 was the first entry-level phone that offered full access to the Internet, with an XHTML browser and POP3/IMAP email client. The tri-band camera phone uses GPRS and EDGE for its internet connections.The phone can be seen as an...

mobile phone

Mobile phone

A mobile phone is a device which can make and receive telephone calls over a radio link whilst moving around a wide geographic area. It does so by connecting to a cellular network provided by a mobile network operator...

. At the moment few mobiles have RFID capability, but this may change, since such RFID enabled mobiles may be used for cashless payments and other purposes.

From 2005 travelers in the city of Hanau

Hanau

Hanau is a town in the Main-Kinzig-Kreis, in Hesse, Germany. It is located 25 km east of Frankfurt am Main. Its station is a major railway junction.- Geography :...

, near Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

, Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

will be able to pay for bus tickets by passing their Nokia phones over a smartcard reader installed on the buses. Other applications for RFID enabled mobiles include swapping electronic business card

Business card

Business cards are cards bearing business information about a company or individual. They are shared during formal introductions as a convenience and a memory aid. A business card typically includes the giver's name, company affiliation and contact information such as street addresses, telephone...

s between phones, and using a mobile to check in at an airport or hotel. Two RFID enabled devices may also be used to enable peer-to-peer transfer of data such as music, images or for synchronizing address books.

Graphical tags

A graphical tag consists of an image on a marker, which can be read by a mobile telephone camera. There are a number of competing systems, including open standards like Quick Response QR Code

QR Code

A QR code is a type of matrix barcode first designed for the automotive industry. More recently, the system has become popular outside of the industry due to its fast readability and comparatively large storage capacity. The code consists of black modules arranged in a square pattern on a white...

s, Datamatrix, Semacode

Semacode

Semacode is a software company based in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. It is also this company's trade name for machine-readable ISO/IEC 16022 data matrix symbols, a type of barcode resembling a crossword puzzle, which encode Internet URLs....

s (based on Datamatrix), SPARQCode

SPARQCode

A SPARQCode is a matrix code encoding standard that is based on the physical QR Code definition created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave.- Overview :...

,and barcode

Barcode

A barcode is an optical machine-readable representation of data, which shows data about the object to which it attaches. Originally barcodes represented data by varying the widths and spacings of parallel lines, and may be referred to as linear or 1 dimensional . Later they evolved into rectangles,...

s; or proprietary systems like ShotCode

ShotCode

ShotCode is a circular barcode created by High Energy Magic of Cambridge University. It uses a dartboard-like circle, with a bullseye in the centre and datacircles surrounding it...

s. The design of such coding schemes needs to be rich enough to include lots of information and robust enough for the tag to be readable, even when partly obscured or damaged: tags might be on the outside of buildings and exposed to wear and the weather.

Graphical tags have a number of advantages. They are easy to understand and cheap to produce. They can also be printed on almost anything, including t-shirts. Barcodes are a particularly attractive form of tagging because they are already very widely used, and camera phone

Camera phone

A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture still photographs . Since early in the 21st century the majority of mobile phones in use are camera phones....

s can easily read them.

SMS

Short message service

Short Message Service is a text messaging service component of phone, web, or mobile communication systems, using standardized communications protocols that allow the exchange of short text messages between fixed line or mobile phone devices...

Applications for object hyperlinking

The object hyperlink

Hyperlink

In computing, a hyperlink is a reference to data that the reader can directly follow, or that is followed automatically. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text with hyperlinks...

ing systems described above will make it possible to link comprehensive and editable information to any object or location. How this capability can best be used remains to be seen. What has emerged so far is a mixture of social and commercial applications.

The publishers of the Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet
Lonely Planet is the largest travel guide book and digital media publisher in the world. The company is owned by BBC Worldwide, which bought a 75% share from the founders Maureen and Tony Wheeler in 2007 and the final 25% in February 2011...

guidebooks are issuing yellow arrows with one of their guidebooks and encouraging travellers to leave tags to stories and comments wherever they go.
Siemens see their virtual tagging system being used to tag tourist sites, and also leave messages for friends. They also suggest that virtual tags could be used to link advertisements with locations. Geominder also offer a virtual tagging service.
Nokia have demonstrated that when a 3220 phone with the RFID shell attached is tapped against an RFID-enabled advertisement, a URL can be read and information about the advertised product or service returned to the phone.
Japanese consumers are able to read barcodes with their mobiles and download comparative prices from Amazon.

Semapedia have created a system for linking physical objects and Wikipedia articles using the Semacode tagging scheme. Graphical tags can be created that link to the URLs of individual Wikipedia articles. These tags can then be attached to the physical objects mentioned in the Wikipedia articles. Reading a tag with a camera phone
Camera phone
A camera phone is a mobile phone which is able to capture still photographs . Since early in the 21st century the majority of mobile phones in use are camera phones....

will then retrieve an article from Wikipedia and display it on the phone screen. This creates the Mobile Wikipedia advocated by Mobile Weblog and Eclectica.
An alternative to using 2d barcodes is to apply computer vision
Computer vision
Computer vision is a field that includes methods for acquiring, processing, analysing, and understanding images and, in general, high-dimensional data from the real world in order to produce numerical or symbolic information, e.g., in the forms of decisions...

techniques to identify more complex patterns and images. Companies like kooaba
Visual Search Engine
A Visual Search Engine is a search engine designed to search for information on the World Wide Web through the input of an image or a search engine with a visual display of the search results. Information may consist of web pages, locations, other images and other types of documents...

, Daem, or Neven Vision (acquired by Google in 2006 ) develop image recognition platforms to turn any image into object hyperlinks.
Microsoft has developed a system for creating hyperlinks using image matching.
Google is now planning to tag 100,000 businesses in the United States with QR codes.

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.

System components

Tags and tag readings systems

Applications for object hyperlinking

See also

External links