Kirill A. Kulakov

Towards an understanding of smart service: The case study for cultural heritage e-Tourism

e-Tourism covers a wide niche of the digital services market. The existing services, although being presented in the large amount in todays Internet, do not achieve high intelligence level. The user still needs to perform a lot of operations manually: to solve a given problem she/he finds and accesses appropriate Internet services or uses mobile applications. A lot of information fragments are linked by the user her/himself, in the mind. In this paper, we discuss the problem of smart service development for the e-Tourism domain. The considered use-case scenario comes from cultural heritage tourism, which is an area of growing application interest We identify smart service attributes that allow a service to achieve a new level of the intelligence. The user becomes more focused on the substantial aspects of solving the problem. We contribute architectural solutions to service design. For the given use-case we show how the service-oriented system can be implemented in the form of a smart space deployed on user-surrounding devices based on the usage of external Internet services and multiple data sources.

An approach to creation of smart space-based trip planning service

Trip planning is among important and complex problems in tourism industry. Trip plan preparation requires data analyzing from a substantial number of services. Usually, service or standalone application provides limited functionality, which can be used only in trip preparation and for basic scenarios. This paper provides an approach to creating Smart Space-based Trip planning service. The Smart Space technology allows to create proactive services with context-based scenarios and multi-service usage. The paper describes trip planning problem as a list of possible tasks and presents mathematical model for common task. The presented approach includes high-level architecture of Smart Spacebased service, scenarios usage and possible data sources from existing third party services and used algorithms for data transformation.

“Accessibility Map” and “Social navigator” services for persons with disabilities

The paper describes development process of information environment for persons with disabilities. Introduction describes the aim and objectives of development, the results of evaluation of typical demands and user scenarios for persons with disabilities. The first section of the main part describes common applications architecture and utilized technologies. Both services use the same data model, which includes description of route parts and roads, as well as information about accessibility of objects stored in the database of “Accessibility Passports” service developed previously. The next section contains description of the development process. The user scenarios, service functions, the use of Geo2Tag platform and Open Street Map with its libraries are presented. In “Social navigator” service the routes are described as a graph with weighted edges, where the weight is the rate of accessibility of the path parts. The mathematical method for estimation of accessibility according to various types of ability restrictions was developed and implemented in the service. The method is based on graph theory and provides an approach to formal ranging of the routes according to the accessibility level of persons with limited mobility.

Application for e-Tourism: Intelligent Mobile Tourist Guide

This paper presents an e-Tourism application for supporting tourists in a region. The application recommends the tourist attractions that are interested to him/her based on the tourist preferences and the current situation in the region. Attractions and their descriptions & images are extracted from accessible Internet sources (like Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Panoramio). They are ranged by the special recommendation service of the application. Recommendations are based on ratings set by the tourists that use the application. The paper describes the service-based application architecture, ontology for intelligent mobile tourist guide services interaction, and evaluation. Developed application is accessible for download in Google Play market for Android device users.

The route planning services approach for people with disability

This paper describes approach and methods used for the development of navigation services for people with disabilities. Our previous papers contained the description of informational environment development for disabled people. The environment includes several applications utilizing unified database and providing the information support to disabled people. The service “Accessibility Passports” was developed to collect information about accessibility of the objects. “Accessibility map” service visualizes the information on the geographical map. This paper is focused on the development of the key service of environment - “Social navigator”. Recently we have presented the service only conceptually without detailed description of navigation approach and methods with adaptation to personal mobility restriction. The paper describes developed methods of navigation for disabled people and elaborated algorithms. Also the practical opportunities of the service to support disabled people are presented. The results of approach study and development work are also presented in the paper.

An Approach to Efficiency Evaluation of Services with Smart Attributes

Nowadaysamountof“smart”servicesine-Tourismisgrowingrapidly.Thisisduetowidespreaduse ofmobiledeviceswithnewinputmethodsandlargeamountofdigitizeddata.Inaddition,Internetof ThingsandBigDataanalyticshasamajorimpactondevelopmentofe-Tourismservicesandcultural heritageservices.Atthesametimethesmartservicesimplementationrequirescomplexmethods andhighcostoftheircreation.Therebythereisanactualproblemtoestimateefficiencyofsmart services.Thispaperpresentsanapproachtoefficiencyevaluationofserviceswithsmartattributes. Theevaluationisbasedonservice’sworktimeutilizationandrequiredmanualwork.Foreachused attributetheexecutionscenario,ordinary(non-smart)serviceforcomparisonandusedestimatesare defined.Eachestimateiscalculatedbytakingintoaccounttheuser’sexperience.Presentedapproach isrelevantforsmartserviceswithbigdataanalytics.Thedemonstrationoftheapproachwascarried outusingCulturaltripplanningservicewithpossibleordinaryservices. KEywoRdS Cultural Heritage Tourism, Efficiency Evaluation, Information Service, Smart Service, Trip Planning

Ontological model of multi-source smart space content for use in cultural heritage trip planning

This paper presents ontological model for storage of cultural heritage and trip planning information in Smart Space. This model combines external information service-specific ontologies to the one generic ontology and provides easy way to construct distributed Smart Space-based service from various modules. Cultural heritage information presented in ontological model is used to search and recommend attractions. The paper contains proposed high-level service architecture and description of various use cases which are verified presented ontological model.

Navigation infrastructure for people with disabilities

The importance of navigation support for people with disability has been demonstrated by convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. This paper presents the navigation infrastructure for people with disabilities. The infrastructure includes map generation service, web interface, mobile services. Also we purpose method of target area examination by volunteers. Using a modified Openstreetmap road graph allows you to build more precise routes. Introduced classification of obstacles types allows you to identify problems in the path of a person with disabilities. Application of Dijkstras-based algorithm with modified edge weights allows you to find safe traffic routes. The results of testing on the pilot region allow us to estimate the amount of work required to improve the quality of peoples live with disabilities.

Smart service efficiency: Evaluation of cultural trip planning service

Nowadays the amount of “smart” services in e-Tourism grows rapidly. This is due to widespread using mobile devices with new input methods and large amount of digital data. Together with that, the smart services require complex methods and high cost of their creation. Thereby we have relevant problem of estimating smart services efficiency. This paper presents evaluation of Cultural trip planning service based on defined smart attributes. For each of used attributes the execution scenario, ordinary service for comparison and used estimates are defined. Each estimate is calculated with taking into account the user experience. The evaluation results allow to compare Cultural trip planning service with some ordinary services.

Experience in developing reference applications with Qt/QML

There are many ways to get required information for people nowadays. One of the most popular among them is using different mobile applications. In this paper we describe our experience in developing reference applications using Qt/QML. Mobile reference applications have its certain advantages such as opportunity to provide the user with required information at any time, storing all the information in mobile device, so it is possible to use its content despite the lack of Internet connection on the device, etc. This paper contains description of designed pattern of developing reference applications. Then we consider the application of this pattern in implementation of three mobile reference applications. However each application has its own special features which are also described in the paper.