Keith Cheverst

Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences

In this paper, we describe our experiences of developing and evaluating GUIDE, an intelligent electronic tourist guide. The GUIDE system has been built to overcome many of the limitations of the traditional information and navigation tools available to city visitors. For example, group-based tours are inherently inflexible with fixed starting times and fixed durations and (like most guidebooks) are constrained by the need to satisfy the interests of the majority rather than the specific interests of individuals. Following a period of requirements capture, involving experts in the field of tourism, we developed and installed a system for use by visitors to Lancaster. The system combines mobile computing technologies with a wireless infrastructure to present city visitors with information tailored to both their personal and environmental contexts. In this paper we present an evaluation of GUIDE, focusing on the quality of the visitors experience when using the system.

Experiences of developing and deploying a context-aware tourist guide: the GUIDE project

The GUIDE system has been developed to provide city visitors with a hand-held context-aware tourist guide. The system has been successfully deployed in a major tourist destination and is currently at the stage where it is publicly available to visitors who wish to explore the city. Reaching this stage has been the culmination of a number of distinct research efforts. In more detail, the development of GUIDE has involved: capturing a real set of application requirements, investigating the properties of a cell-based wireless communications technology in a built-up environment and deploying a network based on this technology around the city, designing and populating an information model to represent attractions and key buildings within the city, prototyping the development of a distributed application running across portable GUIDE units and stationary cell-servers and finally, evaluating the entire system during an extensive field-trial study. This paper reports on our results in each of these areas. We believe that through our work on the GUIDE project we have produced a blueprint for the development of interactive context-aware systems that should be of real value to those in the community who wish to develop such systems in a practical environment.

Using and determining location in a context-sensitive tour guide

In a study that provided unique insights into the challenges associated with developing location-based applications, the Lancaster Guide project used members of the general public to test a network-centric electronic tourist guide. We discuss two main topics. The first is our choice of positioning technology - beacons that broadcast using an IEEE 802.11 wireless network combined with user input. The second topic concerns techniques for generating custom tours for electronic city-guide systems. Guide generates these custom tours by taking into account multiple contextual triggers and user preferences. In practice, producing good tours and, indeed, assessing the quality of a tour are difficult tasks. While our analysis of techniques for producing custom tours is somewhat specific to the city-guide domain we believe that the majority of our work is relevant to location-based systems in general.

Design of an object model for a context sensitive tourist GUIDE

This paper describes work carried out as part of the GUIDE project at Lancaster University. The overall aim of the project is to develop a context-sensitive tourist guide for visitors to the city of Lancaster. Visitors are equipped with portable GUIDE units which in turn provide interactive services and dynamically tailored web-based information reflecting the visitors preferences and environmental context. In contrast to existing tourist systems all information in GUIDE is obtained dynamically using a city-wide wireless network infrastructure. The paper presents an overview of the GUIDE system, with particular focus on our design of an appropriate object model, capable of handling the high degree of flexibility required by GUIDE. In addition, the paper includes the results of our requirements analysis, the web-based application that has been developed to meet these requirements and our approach towards communicating information to portable GUIDE units in a timely and scaleable manner.

A Survey of Map-based Mobile Guides

In this chapter, we present an overview of mobile guides that rely on maps or map-like representations in providing their services. We discuss technical issues as well as problems related to human factors that mobile guides have to cope with in order to assist their respective users. The main part of the chapters describes a number of relevant systems in the field of mobile guides, ranging from influential work such as Cyberguide to systems that offer unique services such as TellMaris. The comparison is based on the issues we identified initially. We conclude with an outlook on future directions such as collaborative usage, new means of interaction and further personalisation of mobile services.

Exploring bluetooth based mobile phone interaction with the hermes photo display

One of the most promising possibilities for supporting user interaction with public displays is the use of personal mobile phones. Furthermore, by utilising Bluetooth users should have the capability to interact with displays without incurring personal financial connectivity costs. However, despite the relative maturity of Bluetooth as a standard and its widespread adoption in todays mobile phones, little exploration seems to have taken place in this area - despite its apparent significant potential. This paper describe the findings of an exploratory study involving our Hermes Photo Display which has been extended to enable users with a suitable phone to both send and receive pictures over Bluetooth. We present both the technical challenges of working with Bluetooth and, through our user study, we present initial insights into general user acceptability issues and the potential for such a display to facilitate notions of community.

An Architecture for the Effective Support of Adaptive Context-Aware Applications

Mobile applications are required to operate in environments characterised by change. More specifically, the availability of resources and services may change significantly during a typical period of system operation. As a consequence, adaptive mobile applications need to be capable of adapting to these changes to ensure they offer the best possible level of service to the user. Our experiences of developing and evaluating adaptive context-aware applications in mobile environments has led us to believe that existing architectures fail to provide the necessary support for such applications. In this paper, we discuss the shortcomings of existing approaches and present work on our own architecture that has been designed to meet the key requirements of context-aware adaptive applications.

Using Context as a Crystal Ball: Rewards and Pitfalls

Abstract: Context-awareness can be used to simplify a user’s understanding of, and interaction with, interactive systems. In effect, through adaptation, context-aware systems can migrate complexity away from the user and into the system (or agent). However, the incorporation of context-awareness raises a number of issues. For example, users are required to trust the behaviour of the system’s intelligence and this requires the system to have predictable behaviour and the ability to successfully and consistently preempt the user’s goal. Unfortunately, the agent may incorrectly preempt the user’s goal, owing to either flawed intelligence or to incorrect or out-of-date contextual information. In such circumstances the user is likely to feel frustration because the system will either appear overly prescriptive or, worse still, present incorrect results. This paper considers these issues, a number of which are described in anecdotal form, based on our experiences in developing and evaluating the context-aware GUIDE system.

Exploiting context to support social awareness and social navigation

The utilization of context (such as user location and user profile) opens up many new avenues for encouraging social interaction. The web-based GUIDE system enables visitors to the city of Lancaster to interact with an information model that represents the city via a hand-held and context-aware tourist guide. Our current work is focusing on extending the functionality of the (previously single user) GUIDE system by making parts of the information model public. In particular, the physical location of visitors can now be represented in the information space in order to enable a form of social awareness among city visitors. In addition, visitors can also change the information space by, for example, augmenting existing descriptions of the citys attractions with their own ratings. We believe that explicitly capturing and tagging the context associated with ratings provides a powerful mechanism for automatically tailoring information presented to the user.

The Role of Connectivity in Supporting Context-Sensitive Applications

This paper considers the role of network connectivity in supporting context-sensitive applications. A range of context-sensitive applications are analysed with respect to connectivity. Following this analysis a design space is constructed which enables the positioning of context-sensitive applications depending on their reliance on network connectivity and their reliance on local storage. Further consideration of the role of connectivity is achieved through a study of the GUIDE system which has been developed to provide context-sensitive information to visitors to the city of Lancaster. The current GUIDE system utilises a cell-based wireless network infrastructure to provide both location information and dynamic information to mobile GUIDE units. However, coverage throughout the city is not complete and this raises a number of design implications, including how to maintain a visitors trust in the system when outside of cell coverage.