A location aware mobile tourist guide selecting and interpreting sights and services by context matching

Most tourists exploring a destination either join a guided tour or walk on their own using maps. Neither are their individual preferences nor the actual situation considered. These tours are strongly inflexible. The ideal is an intelligent guide taking care of the whole tour organisation and execution in time. This is the main objective of the Dynamic Tour Guide (DTG). The DTG is a mobile agent that selects attractions, plans an individual tour, provides navigational guidance and offers location based interpretation. This kind of ambient intelligence is based on the analysis of all available context information to support the tourist in any possible way with the help of a mobile device

A City Guide Agent Creating and Adapting Individual Sightseeing Tours Based on Field Trial Results

Abstract: Tourists deciding to explore a destination spontaneously on their own often end up following the majority to the crowded locations. Today’s agent technology provides the opportunity for intelligent guides taking care of the whole tour organisation and execution in time and thus providing individual experiences. This is the main objective of the Dynamic Tour Guide (DTG)- a mobile agent that selects attractions, plans individual tours, provides navigational guidance and offers location based interpretation. Over all it consistently adapts the tour to a tourist’s specific behaviour in order to provide any possible support via a mobile device. A field trial served to clarify fundamental questions to achieve personality in mobile context: Is it possible to seed interest profiles that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings of sights? Are these profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalised tours on individual interests? Do personal tours really affect spatial behaviour of tourists? Analyzing the captured interest profiles gives an insight into their actual diversity, discusses their necessity and helps simulating an improved distribution of tourists at a destination

Development and evaluation of a context-driven, mobile tourist guide

Abstract 1 – The behavior of tourists strongly depends on the availability and quality of information. A lack as well as a flood of information can be disorientating and forces many tourists to join the majority visiting major sights. This causes a few crowded places in contrast to many empty. The target of the Dynamic Tour Guide (DTG) is to improve the tourists ’ spatial behavior by means of pervasive computing based on the actual context which is defined by personal interests, location and schedule of a tourist. It enables a personalized, spontaneous and guided tour. After a review of the DTG architecture results of a field study are presented. In this field study the following question were analyzed: 1) Is it possible to seed interest profiles in the mobile context that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings? 2) Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? 3) How do personalized tours affect the spatial behavior of tourist? Three methods to elicit the preferences of tourist in the mobile context are compared with actual rankings using Spearman’s rank order coefficient. The diversity of the interest profiles is analyzed in various ways leading to the conclusion that personalized interest profiles are necessary. For the gathered profiles tours are being computed and simulated in order to gain a first insight into the effect on the spatial behavior of tourists. Index Terms – context, mobile computing, dynamic tour guide, ontology, semantic matching, personalized tour I

Die datenschutz- und sicherheitskonforme Ausgestaltung von Location Based Services am Beispiel eines mobilen Touristenführers

Location Based Services eröffnen die Möglichkeit neuartiger, individuell auf den Nutzer abgestimmter Dienste. Gleichzeitig stellen sie die herkömmlichen datenschutzrechtlichen Konzepte zum Schutz der informationellen Selbstbestimmung vor eine neue Herausforderung. Der folgende Beitrag stellt am Beispiel eines mobilen Touristenführers dar, wie sich durch eine vorausschauende Technikgestaltung die Vorteile und Potentiale eines Location Based Service realisieren lassen, ohne dabei datenschutzrechtliche Grundsätze zu vernachlässigen

Using location-based tracking data to analyze the movements of city tourists

This article presents a methodology to analyze the spatial behavior of tourists based on tracking data. This method was applied during a field study in the city of Görlitz at the east border of Germany. Based on Global Positioning System (GPS) logs the spatial distribution of visitors in various areas is visualized and analyzed. Using the bimodality of the distribution of walking speeds, areas of slowdown are identified and subsequently clustered into activity areas. Using the activity areas, the amount of time tourists allocate to various activity categories is computed. Furthermore, a subsequent analysis of the activity behavior is used to identify the current visiting pattern of tourists and a network analysis of the identified activity areas is used to locate hubs. The network analysis highlights sequences of sights used very often and therefore identifies the beaten paths