A simple service
Monday, March 08, 2010
10:40 AM
A simple service: location awareness
Input: your IP address. 
Output: your probable physical location in <lat,long> notation. 
Mechanism: a database of IP addresses to <lat,long> pairs. 
Theoretically, one can code this information into domain name service. 
In actuality, few people do this, and one has to infer location from context, which is a long-term process.
Solution: a Hadoop datastore that maps IP addresses to <lat,long> pairs. 