A Contextual Geofencing Mobile Tourism Service
Tourists have become active mobile technology users while on route. They request information anytime, anywhere, so it has to be personalized to better satisfy their needs. This paper presents a Contextual Geofencing Mobile Tourism Service that proactively
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Abstract Tourists have become active mobile technology users while on route. They request information anytime, anywhere, so it has to be personalized to better satisfY their needs. This paper presents a Contextual Geofencing Mobile Tourism Service that proactively sends push based notifications to visitors' mobile devices according to their context. These notifications are linked to concrete areas and to specific context conditions. This way, if a visitor is inside an area that contains a notification and her context values match the defined conditions, the system will send that notification to the visitor. The service is composed of a mobile client, where visitors receive and manage notifications and a web client, where tourism entities (e.g., tourism offices, restaurants) can define virtual areas, create notifications and configure the context conditions that trigger the notification sending process. The implemented architecture and some user experiences are also described. Keywords: Tourism Guide, Context-Aware, Mobile Service, Recommender System.
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Introduction
Mobile technologies have been greatly improved in recent years (e.g., GPS, accelerometer, Internet access everywhere, touch screen) enabling the emergence of new mobile services. Moreover, tourists have become active technology users while on route, having Internet access anywhere through their mobile devices. This tourism scenario is favourable in order to deploy new tourism mobile services that assist visitors on the move, like location based services (Steiniger, Neun, & Edwardes, 2006), which provide information about points of interest based on the visitor's location, whenever and wherever they are. The mobile environment is quite different from the desktop environment so the requested information has to be customized in order to increase visitors' satisfaction and fulfil their needs on the move. One of the key aspects for this personalization concerns data about people, objects and their surroundings (iocation, user preferences, temperature, etc.) which are known as context data (Dey, Abowd, & Salber, 2001). The development of services that manage context data is quite complex and involve several new challenges that have to be faced in order to provide the correct architectures to support them. Context data coming from different sources has to be acquired. These sources are usually distributed and provide heterogeneous data. Acquired context raw data has no meaning for a computer so a data model is needed
R. Law et al. (eds.), Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2011 © Springer-Verlag/Wien 2011
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to represent it and manage it. Furthermore, a context information process is needed to infer visitor's high level context. Finally, all processed data has to be delivered to applications in order to provide personalized information according to the visitor's situation. All these complex tasks require new types of software architectures. Most of the existing commercial mobile guides make use of the visitor's location and user profi
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