Carlos Lamsfus

Going Mobile Defining Context for On-the-Go Travelers

Travel behavior is becoming inherently dynamic and socially connected because of the increasing use of mobile technologies; as such, the concept of context is becoming increasingly important in travel and tourism and particularly within today’s technology-supported mobile environment. This article builds upon existing literature describing recent developments in context-aware system design with the aim of defining the notion of context as it relates to the mobile technological environment for tourism. As part of this effort, a conceptual framework is proposed to describe the structure and fundamental properties of context, and several implications are discussed for tourism research and the design of mobile systems.

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 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.

Conceptualizing Context in an Intelligent Mobile Environment in Travel and Tourism

Context in travel and tourism represents the bridge between a specific need and the necessary information to fulfil that requirement. The notion of context is becoming popular in travel and tourism in areas such as location-based services that support decision-making on the go. It becomes even more important within today’s intelligent mobile environment for travel, which is represented by cutting-edge mobile technologies including smartphones and their apps. It is argued that it is necessary to conceptualize the notion of context in relation to the holistic tourism experience and the behavioural characteristics of travel. By bringing together literature on context-awareness computing and travel and tourism, this paper challenges existing approaches to context modelling and offers insights into the rich and multidimensional nature of the notion of context in travel and tourism. Finally, it offers a number of design principles for context modelling and calls for interdisciplinary research on understanding the notion of context in tourism.

A Methodology and a Web Platform for the Collaborative Development of Context-Aware Systems

Information and services personalization is essential for an optimal user experience. Systems have to be able to acquire data about the users context, process them in order to identify the users situation and finally, adapt the functionality of the system to that situation, but the development of context-aware systems is complex. Data coming from distributed and heterogeneous sources have to be acquired, processed and managed. Several programming frameworks have been proposed in order to simplify the development of context-aware systems. These frameworks offer high-level application programming interfaces for programmers that complicate the involvement of domain experts in the development life-cycle. The participation of users that do not have programming skills but are experts in the application domain can speed up and improve the development process of these kinds of systems. Apart from that, there is a lack of methodologies to guide the development process. This article presents as main contributions, the implementation and evaluation of a web platform and a methodology to collaboratively develop context-aware systems by programmers and domain experts.

Context-based tourism information filtering with a semantic rule engine.

This paper presents the CONCERT framework, a push/filter information consumption paradigm, based on a rule-based semantic contextual information system for tourism. CONCERT suggests a specific insight of the notion of context from a human mobility perspective. It focuses on the particular characteristics and requirements of travellers and addresses the drawbacks found in other approaches. Additionally, CONCERT suggests the use of digital broadcasting as push communication technology, whereby tourism information is disseminated to mobile devices. This information is then automatically filtered by a network of ontologies and offered to tourists on the screen. The results obtained in the experiments carried out show evidence that the information disseminated through digital broadcasting can be manipulated by the network of ontologies, providing contextualized information that produces user satisfaction.

Smart Tourism Destinations: An Extended Conception of Smart Cities Focusing on Human Mobility

Smart Cities are paving the way for the development of new services in the field of tourism. The “smart” concept is based on the intensive deployment of Information and Communication Technology infrastructures, as well as on the proliferation of mobile technology and its apps. However, a destination is not smart because it makes intensive use of technology. It is smart because it also uses technology in order to seek a deeper understanding about the characteristics and meaning of human mobility. It uses latent knowledge and capacities to empower local institutions and industries to create knowledge-based policies and advanced mobile services for visitors. This paper presents a new approach to the Smart Destination concept and a cloud-based infrastructure designed to reach that vision. This infrastructure promotes the creation of advanced mobile tourism applications by tourism stakeholders with tools adapted to people with no programming skills.

Context Management Platform for Tourism Applications

The notion of context has been widely studied and there are several authors that have proposed different definitions of context. However, context has not been widely studied in the framework of human mobility and the notion of context has been imported directly from other computing fields without specifically addressing the tourism domain requirements. In order to store and manage context information a context data model and a context management platform are needed. Ontologies have been widely used in context modelling, but many of them are designed to be applied in general ubiquitous computing environments, do not contain specific concepts related to the tourism domain or some approaches do not contain enough concepts to represent context information related to the visitor on the move. That is why we propose a new approach to provide a better solution to model context data in tourism environments, adding more value to our solution reusing data about tourist resources from an Open Data repository and publishing it as Linked Data. We also propose the architecture for a context information management platform based on this context data model.

Context management in mobile environments: a semantic approach

This paper presents a first draft of a context management model and architecture in the scope of mobile end-user services, paying special attention to mobile scenarios and specific mobility environments. The paper describes our notion of context and presents the process followed for developing the ontologies for representing context, providing an overview of the first version of these ontologies. Besides, we propose an architecture for managing context in mobile environments, including high-level descriptions of the components that compose it, as well as some low level details regarding the contextual interfaces involved. To show the way all these components interoperate and the advantages of the defined architecture and semantic model, we describe a use case with specific implementation details.

Mash-up Applications for Small Destination Management Organizations Websites

Multimedia plays a role on the Web which is guaranteed to grow in significance as individuals and organizations increasingly generate digital content. Parallel to the development of richer media online is the discovery of “Web as platform”, termed Web 2.0 in some quarters.. As rich media and Web 2.0 converge, new requirements arise which need new solutions. In this paper, we describe the SOCITUR project, which aims at implementing innovative user-friendly interfaces for destination marketing and promotion portals based on Web 2.0 technologies that will encourage and simplify the indexation, aggregation and sharing of multimedia content generated by both DMO and tourists. This paper focuses on the architecture and developed components of the system.

Listening to CEOs: A New Perspective to Study Technology Adoption in Hotels

Information and communication technology (ICT) continues to change the nature of contemporary tourism. ICT is particularly relevant to the hospitality industry, since it is regarded a main source of competitive advantage. Yet, reports published recently reveal that tourism is behind in technology adoption than other industrial sectors. Some works have analysed technology adoption in tourism. However, most come from other fields and the few examples relating the tourism sector are outdated. Thus, it is necessary to identify the reasons why technology adoption remains low in hotels and to find out the drivers of technology adoption in this sector. This paper analyses the data gathered from interviews and focus groups carried out with hoteliers. This phenomenological approach provided evidence on the problems with current technology, discovered some barriers and drivers of technology adoption and identified some ICT priorities.