Staticfree Blog

Various tech blogs posted a link to a nifty technology for camera-equipped cellphones: Semacode. Semacode 2D barcode system for printing camera-phone readable URLs. There's a demo client for SymbianOS (Series 60 it seems) and a Java encoder. You type a URL into the Java encoder, press "go" and you have an image that, when you print it and stick it to things, can be photographed and turned back into a URL on the phone.

This reminded me of Anti-mega's previous post on a similar subject. The difference here is Anti-mega was talking about encoding RDF data itself in the barcode, not just a link.

This, of course, reminded me of another site that came across my radar recently: Placetime.com's WGS 84 Geographic Point URI Space. This provides a URI vocabulary for talking about geographic points in space (Geekhaus for example). Placetime offers a nifty service that will generate appropriate RDF for a given URI. Now, toss one of the geo URIs into a Semacode, print it, and you have a flexible, machine-readable way of publishing a geographic coordinate in meatspace.

Possible applications: a sign in a park with the barcodes printed on it. Embedded in the barcodes are URIs of geographic coordinates of landmarks. You could then take your cellphone/GPS/PDA/datasponge and wander around the park, checking out the points of interest without needing a physical map. Of course, it'd be better to encode the actual RDF in the barcode itself, but due to current datasize and camera quality, that's not entirely possible.

Maybe provide a more automated way of tagging in for urban-wilderness games like PacManhattan.

The main issues with Semacode is unrelated to Semacode itself. Most cellcams need to get better short-range focusing capability. As-is, it seems to take a 3-4cm image of the barcode to get my Nokia 3650 to read the barcode. That's a bit big when you're talking about a magazine-scale print medium.