The Web can be a world unto itself, but there are many times when it would be nice if you could understand its correspondence to actual geography. Say you want the Web sites of all the museums in Boston within a few miles of your apartment, or directions to the shoe repair store nearest to where you're standing with your Web-enabled cell phone. Some search engines and online directories can provide the information, but the power and accuracy of your search depend on how many sites that search engine has indexed, or how many businesses have registered their addresses with the directory.

What if, instead, there was a consistent way for all Internet-navigation tools to keep track of businesses' and organizations' real-world locations, as well as their Internet addresses? That's just what a new Internet architecture proposed by Menlo Park, Calif.'s SRI International aims to do.