Semapedia: Real-World meets Wikipedia

Imagine a world where you could visit a castle in Austria, press a button and read a Wikipedia article about the castle’s history and occupants. With Semapedia, now you can.

This isn’t about public Internet kiosks, it’s about using your cellphone as an active travel guide and it’s about physical annotation meeting up with information access.

Semacodes are optical barcodes that you can read with your cell phone. They use black and white blocks to encode Web addresses. Semapedia is an all-volunteer program that encourages people to place encoded Wikipedia article semacodes at the real places they describe. Don’t run out to an Internet cafe’; visit these places and the information meets you there.

Semapedia’s future depends on building up popular support and awareness. Ubiquitous computing isn’t just a great idea. It’s becoming a concrete reality.

Semapedia

Die Dulci Fruere