lnai 8445 - iguide: socially-enriched mobile tourist guide...

A. Likas, K. Blekas, and D. Kalles (Eds.): SETN 2014, LNAI 8445, pp. 603–614, 2014. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

iGuide: Socially-Enriched Mobile Tourist Guide for Unexplored Sites

Sofia Tsekeridou1, Vassileios Tsetsos2, Aimilios Chalamandaris3, Christodoulos Chamzas4, Thomas Filippou5, and Christos Pantzoglou4

1 Athens Information Technology – AIT, Peania Attikis, Greece [email protected]

2 Mobics, Athens, Greece [email protected]

3 Innoetics Ltd., Marousi, Athens, Greece [email protected]

4 Athena R.I.C., Xanthi Branch & Democritus University of Thrace, Greece [email protected]

5 Vodafone Greece, Chalandri, Greece [email protected]

Abstract. The paper presents iGuide, a system that aims at enabling a socially enriched mobile tourist guide service, with the aim to address a much wider range of sites and attractions than existing solutions cover, including historic and traditional settlements, sites of natural beauty or unattended sites of cultural heritage where access to information is unavailable or not directly provided. The casual visitor will obtain information and guidance while personally contributing to content enrichment of the visiting places by uploading user-generated media (images, videos) along with personalised views about the acquired experience (comments, ratings). At the same time, users will receive supplementary location-based services and recommendations to enhance their visiting experience and facilitate their wandering in places of interest and their direct interaction with local provisions. iGuide targets to offer text-to-speech (narration), rich multimedia content including real time 3D graphics, augmented reality services and a backend Web 2.0 informational portal and recommender tool.

Keywords: Mobile tourist guide, recommender tool, personalization, social media, 3D cultural content, augmented reality.

1 Introduction

E-tourism services that enhance visitor’s experiences by providing in situ timely vali-dated information are still inexistent or insufficient. The visit is usually affected by severe content issues such as: inadequate or outdated content, inaccessibility intro-duced by language barriers and misinformation. Most of the existing e-tourism sys-tems mainly provide Web-based access to tourist information and services. In most

604 S. Tsekeridou et al.

cases, this is experienced prior to the visit while only a few provide in situ services. The latter are usually limited to specific sites (museums, or popular archaeological sites). Thus, there is an imminent need for developing e-tourism services and asso-ciated digital cultural content that will be available on the spot for places of interest while the tourist is visiting a cultural site, a scene of natural beauty or mainly unat-tended cultural attractions where no other source of valid information is directly available. Furthermore, social networking and social media applications have already large user penetration. They are utilised in various contexts (business and pleasure) as they allow content co-creation and sharing by setting users as active content contribu-tors and reviewers.

The paper presents the iGuide system that focuses on dynamic e-tourism service provisioning offering contextualised cultural exploration on the move. It aims to enhance user experience by enabling the provision of dynamic location-based tourist information and recommendations while allowing active users to contribute in terms of content, ratings, tags, etc. Evidently, cultural heritage and tourism are domains that can benefit in terms of accessibility and economic development from the advances of information and communication technologies [1]. Currently, human-computer interac-tion applications such as virtual mobile guides are evolving into a standard tool [1][2]. This is also a result of the Web 2.0 technology trends as social networking mechan-isms and processes like tagging or geo-tagging, allow users with similar interests to share experiences and become a part of a community [3]. The use of smartphones may change tourist experience by changing both timing and information searching patterns [4]. G. Ghiani et al. [5] proposed a smartphone-based museum guide system with edutainment features. Kathayat et al. [6] proposed a collaborative learning plat-form that facilitates interactive games performed in urban environments. Weber et al. [7] demonstrated the potential of location-based applications in tourism and cultural heritage. Additionally, Google presented the Latitude service which allows people to access information on where, when and what their friends are doing [8]. The Wiketude World Browser [8] provides details on prominent locations. The Mobile Tourguide System uses panoramic image collections to recognise the content of an uploaded image [10]. On the other hand, DBpedia mobile [11] is one of the few appli-cations that take advantage of the Semantic Web.

Furthermore, the importance of managing content and metadata of tourist and cul-tural heritage content is depicted by the number of existing standards. Amongst the most notable are: CIDOC [12], Core Data Index to Historic Buildings and Monu-ments of the Architectural Heritage [19], CIDOC CRM [14], MIDAS Heritage [15], LIDO [16], Dublin Core [17] and Spectrum [18]. They have designed to assist the production of record systems, to facilitate archaeological research, to classify individ-ual heritage assets in terms of location, functional types, architectural features, physi-cal conditions, protection status, activities, geospatial-temporal information and other bibliographic sources,. The EU is currently funding projects that focus on harvesting metadata of 2D and 3D cultural heritage content [19] [20] and on developing informa-tion provisioning systems for cultural sites [21]. The interoperability of a metadata schema is one of the most vital aspects and hence its creation has to comply with the current best practices.

iGuide: Socially-Enriched Mobile Tourist Guide for Unexplored Sites 605

During the last five years, social media applications have become very popular. This has led many companies to consider such services in various application con-texts, including education, e-government, tourism, etc. Social media applications such as YouTube, Flickr and other have been enriched in millions with tourist and cultural content. Tourists consult Web sites that offer visitors comments and ratings, to decide on their destinations prior to their visit and share their own views. Trip advisor is such an example. A distinct example of exploiting social media applications in the tourism domain is Empedia [22]. The importance of social media applications towards boost-ing a country’s tourism economy though branding is vital.

Nowadays, Recommender systems are an essential research area [23]. Current sys-tems identify the target user’s neighbours based on profile similarities, and then sug-gest items that neighbours have liked in the past. User profiling is a challenging task. User profiles are usually based on data of limited relevance that are too simple to produce quality recommendations [24]. Massive quantities of User Generated Content (UGC) on social networks are now available - UGC warehouses can be mined and analysed to expand user profiles based on which more reliable recommendations can be made. The methodology of incorporating new Web 2.0 features and practices in personalised recommender applications becomes an important and urgent research topic that will be investigated in the context of e-tourism.

Furthermore, feature and capability multiformity found in devices that access digi-tal information necessitates the provisioning of content adaptation and personalisation mechanisms. Content adaptation is interlinked with mobile devices that differentiate in terms of computational power, network bandwidth, display size, constrained text input as well as dynamic user contexts (location, preferences, etc.). Examples of browsing content adaptation systems are: Everyplace Mobile Portal [25], Cocoon [26], MyMobileWeb [27], Alembik [28], Dilithium Content Adapter [29]. The W3C consortium has been documenting the challenges in building Web content and appli-cations that are accessed by mobile devices [30]. Apart from content adaptation, iGuide will conduct research on providing 3D content to mobile devices. Currently, X3DOM technology can be seen as a unified carrier of accelerated 3D graphics. Re-cently, Jung et al. [31] demonstrated the capabilities of X3DOM-WebGL technolo-gies on different platforms.

iGuide differentiates from existing solutions as it advances the state-of-the-art by offering:

• A mobile tourist and cultural heritage virtual guide that provides dynamically con-textualised, timely and validated information, enhanced with visualisation and nar-ration capabilities. The information is adapted to the end user’s context while being complemented with personalised recommendations. Its content adaptation mechan-ism takes under consideration the smartphone hardware capabilities. iGuide allows access to social media applications for content- and experience-sharing. User-generated content can be filtered and used for the enrichment of the provided con-tent. The goal is to innovate through the integration and interoperation of a number of value-added technological capabilities and services, offered as a personalised and contextualised package to the tourist.


• A universal e-tourism solution that is focused on unattended cultural heritage sites, natural environment routes and historic-traditional settlements. iGuide will provide content and metadata management tools to upload and manage tourist and cultural information of new places of interest and the interoperation with existing cultural-content archives and digital libraries. The content enrichment through iGuide’s in-teroperation with social media applications will add value to the on-site but also to the pre- and post-visit experience of the end user.

In the sequel, Section 2 presents the envisioned use cases of iGuide against which its fully-featured functionalities will be evaluated. Section 3 presents the conceptual architecture definition of iGuide and provides a more detailed technical description of each iGuide component. Finally, Section 4 outlines the conclusions and discusses on the future work.

2 The iGuide Use Cases

The feasibility of the iGuide system and its envisioned services will be evaluated in terms of properly defined use cases. The latter further present the diversity of the iGuide usage contexts according to the interests, actions and/or context of the end user. These use cases of iGuide are listed and briefly described below:

2.1 Pre-scenario - Pre-visit Experience

The user visits the iGuide social media portal and collects information about his/her destination, reads and exchanges information about the experiences other users had or requests from others to comment on his/her visiting choices. The system dynamically updates the user profile based on chosen locations, places of interest, travel times, number of visitors, etc. By the time the user visits his/her destination, content is being filtered based on the user profile updates. Further advanced personalisation takes place on the spot during the visit based on dynamic contextual user information lead-ing to dynamically produced recommendations. Moreover, prior to the actual visit, the user can download an offline map that will be available during the visit, so that net-work connectivity is not a prerequisite for enjoying advanced tourist experience.

2.2 1st Scenario - Touring in Urban Areas of Cultural Importance

The visitor approaches a settlement in an urban area of cultural importance, like the old town of Xanthi (Figure 1), having initiated the iGuide mobile application. Infor-mation about the surroundings (buildings of architectural and historical interest, mu-seums, shopping options, current or future events) appear on the smartphone device following an easy-to-follow thematic structure. As visitors can access different types of information, this is dynamically adapted based on user’s current location and pre-defined filters or the filters the system has dynamically enabled by extracting user profile information. The information covers multimedia content such as images,

iGuide: Social

video, 3D models, audio (ethe ability to listen to all ofgy. The system will also prthe visitor’s profile. It will rlar interests that have beenpreliminary selection of thXanthi are shown with red n

Fig. 1. A map of the old tow

2.3 2nd Scenario - Tou

The visitor approaches an umissing and initiates the iG

lly-Enriched Mobile Tourist Guide for Unexplored Sites

e.g. local folklore music), augmented reality elements f the textual information using the text-to-speech technoropose trails and points-of-interest, classified accordingrecommend visiting experiences of prior visitors with sin published on the social media portal. As an examplehe points of cultural/historic interest in the old townnumbers on its map (Figure 1).

wn of Xanthi with numbered points of cultural/historic interes

uring in Open Unattended Archaeological Sites

unattended archaeological site where handy informationGuide mobile application. Such a site has been selected

607

and olo-g to imi-e, a

n of

st

n is d to


be the village of Maroneiatheatre (Figure 2). Informapears on the smartphone forience as in the 1st scenarrecommendations.

Fig. 2. A map of the Maronetext

2.4 3rd Scenario - Tour

The visitor approaches a sitiGuide mobile application iment that its width is miniThe system dynamically poinformation can be listened

a and its surrounding archaeological sites, like its ancition about the site (both archaeological and historical) ollowing a user-friendly thematic structure. Similar exrio follows with respect to adapted content, narration

eia village and its surrounding archaeological sites shown in

ring in Open Nature Sites

te of natural beauty using any means of transport while is already running. Such a site is the Nestos river in a smal (Figure 3) that attains many points of natural beauop-ups information about the specific area and all text

d to (narrated). Assuming that the visitor requires all ty

ient ap-

xpe-and

red

the seg-uty. tual

ypes


of information related to the area, the application brings up a note about an archaeo-logical site that is nearby, about the accessible nature observation points and about a waterfall. The user decides to visit the waterfall. The application accompanies the visitor throughout the chosen trail and provides information about the flora and fauna, the water springs and all other important points-of-interest.

Fig. 3. A map of the segment of Nestos river where its width is minimal, with many points of natural beauty

2.5 Post-Scenario - After-Visit Experience

The user may use the social media portal to upload comments, tagged videos and photos, after he/she has completed his/her visit in order to share the experience, to further promote the visited sites. Other users of the application will be notified accor-dingly so that social interaction between this virtual community starts over.

3 The iGuide System

The presented iGuide system integrates a significant number of technologies ranging from wireless communications, optimised multimedia content (2D/3D) visualisation, mobile application software engineering up to location-based and context aware data processing, digital content and metadata management, mobile social media and social networking software development and content recommendation and personalisation. The iGuide system will provide content depending on geo-location and filtering crite-ria given by users or retrieved by a smartphone. The application will construct perso-nalised and contextualised virtual tour guides presenting dynamic content in urban areas of cultural importance, unattended archaeological sites and natural beauty sites, in addition to providing value added content and services such as mobile social soft-ware, personalised advertisements and offers, according to user preferences, location and context. Semantically annotated geo-locations will be exploited for constructing dynamic tour guides.


Figure 2 depicts the basic components that in an integrative and interoperate mode lead to the provision of the iGuide service. Within iGuide, the dynamic context in-formation collection is of vital importance for adapting all envisioned services and providing accurate and timely recommendations to the end user. Context information may include: user profile, mobile platform capabilities, wireless network status, fi-nancial data (costs per use, etc.), location and place of interest, service time request, activity, media and information from other users of the service (collaborative filtering). The recommendation approach will thus benefit from a hybrid method combining both content filtering and collaborative filtering approaches and deploying powerful dynamic user profiling functionalities.

In addition, a complementary Web-based and Mobile-friendly tourism and social media portal will be researched upon and developed to service not only the on the spot tourist experience as an alternate information channel accessed through the mo-bile Web browser, but also to allow prior or after the visit information provisioning, experience sharing, rating and commenting in an attempt to provide a complete end-to-end service and associated experience to the user.

The fundamental components of the iGuide System, composed of the iGuide Serv-er and Social Media Portal, the iGuide Mobile Application and the Visitor Awareness System, are conceptually illustrated in Figure 4.

Fig. 4. Conceptual Architecture of the iGuide System

The description and functionalities of each illustrated component of the iGuide Server and Social Media Portal in Figure 1 are briefly described below:


• Web Server: It serves Web content to both mobile and desktop clients. Several content management tools and services can be deployed in the server as Web ap-plications.

• Content and Metadata Archive: The system’s persistence store where both cul-tural content and metadata settings are kept.

• Content and Metadata Management: It manages (insert, delete, update, semanti-cally tag) the content and metadata handling.

• Content Adaptation: It adapts content to an appropriate, for the user’s mobile device, format. This may imply content transcoding, filtering, etc. The basic differ-ence in preparation and adaptation is their time of occurrence. The former takes place before content delivery, while the latter occurs during service execution and content delivery. The latter is also affected by the recommendation and personali-sation engines.

• Content Delivery Optimisation: Several techniques can be used under challeng-ing conditions, to optimise the content delivery to mobile devices. Content pre-fetching based on user’s movement or location-based content caching will be con-sidered.

• iGuide Portal and Social Media Platform: iGuide is inherently a social media platform. Thus, all possible interactions between (location-based) social media ap-plications will be investigated.

• Recommendation Engine: It will provide context-aware recommendations of cultural content and added value services (targeted advertisements and offers) based on state of the art techniques. Content, user and environment semantics will be exploited where available.

• Personalisation Engine: Is a fundamental component of content adaptation that constitutes a substrate for all context-aware functionality. Content delivery or rec-ommendations may be affected by the engine’s results. Knowledge engineering approaches (e.g. rules, ontologies etc.) will be deployed for its implementation.

Furthermore, the fundamental components of the iGuide Mobile Application are the following:

• iGuide Media Player: The fundamental component of the mobile client applica-tion used for the provision and visualisation of the contextualised and adapted information to the end-user. A prototype will be developed on an open platform (Android). However, the design of the client will be platform-agnostic. The media player will consist of User Interface elements (for browsing-rendering of cultural content), a Text-to-Speech (TTS) system interface, a local Location-based Services (LBS) engine, an augmented reality player, user device persistence managing and other local components necessary for the desired functionality.

• User/Device/Context Profiling: The component will register and/or dynamically collect context information with respect to device capabilities, user profile and pre-ferences not already available at the iGuide server, location, network connectivity status, etc. The logging and use of such context data enables service adaptation and personalisation as well as provisioning of targeted recommendations in addition to such contextual data gathered in the iGuide server.


• Mobile Social Media Software: The goal is to enable location-based mobile so-cial applications, develop a respective community and provide services to users to bookmark and thus receive personalised information for visiting places and recommendations over a smartphone.

• iGuide Narrator: A Text-to-Speech (TTS) system will be adapted for mobile platforms (specifically Android) in order to provide Greek and English narration during the guiding phase. An initial web-based prototype of the system can be accessed at [34].

4 Conclusions and Future Work

The paper has presented the iGuide system, a Socially Enriched Mobile Tourist Guide targeted mainly, but not only, to Unexplored Sites. Existing solutions and state-of-the-art research and technologies have been discussed, while the innovations brought around by iGuide have been emphasized. The use cases that iGuide facilitates and provisions for have been presented, demonstrating the diversity of usage contexts of iGuide along with its multi-component and multi-functional system architecture, which has also been presented. Major components of the iGuide system architecture are the Recommendation and Personalization Engines along with the Dynamic Us-er/Device/Context Profiling Module, components that enable dynamic and timely recommendations on touristic content to end users according to their preferences, the preferences of their peers, their context (location) and their device characteristics.

Future work will include finalization of the sites of interests and guidance scenarios as well as modes of presentation of the respective content to end users, requirements engineering and system architectural specification. It will further involve research and development of the innovative methodologies for each identified system module, along with integration of the developed components, as well as testing and evaluation under real-life use contexts. The utmost goal is to achieve enhanced user experience in a natural way.

Acknowledgment. The current work has been partially funded by national and European Commission funds from NSRF 2007-2013, OP Competitiveness and Enterpreneurship, Cooperation 2011, in the context of the project iGuide: Socially Enriched Mobile Tourist Guide for Unexploited Cultural and Natural Monuments, 11ΣΥΝ_10_1205.

References

1. Pletinckx, D.: The Integration of Location Based Services in Tourism and Cultural Herit-age. EPOCH Publication, http://www.epoch-net.org/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=198&Itemid=304

2. Floch, J.: A Framework for User-Tailored City Exploration. In: Procs. of the Third Interna-tional Symposium on End-User Development, June 7-10, pp. 239–244 (2011)


3. Schneider, F., Feldmann, A., Krishnamurthy, B., Willinger, W.: Understanding online social network usage from a network perspective. In: Procs. of the 9th ACM SIGCOMM Conference on Internet Measurement Conference, Chicago, Illinois, USA, pp. 35–48 (2009)

4. Kramer, R., Modsching, M., Hagen, K., Gretzel, U.: Behavioural impacts of mobile tour guides. In: Procs. of the Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism, pp. 109–118 (2007)

5. Ghiani, G., Paternò, F., Spano, L.D.: Cicero designer: An Environment for End-User De-velopment of Multi-Device Museum Guides. In: Pipek, V., Rosson, M.B., de Ruyter, B., Wulf, V. (eds.) IS-EUD 2009. LNCS, vol. 5435, pp. 265–274. Springer, Heidelberg (2009)

6. Kathayat, S.B., Braek, R.: Platform Support for Situated Collaborative Learning. In: Procs. of Int. Conf. on Mobile, Hybrid, and On-line Learning (eL&mL). IEEE Press, Los Alamitos (2009)

7. Weber, M., Stan, A., Ioannidis, G.: Location-Aware and User-Centric Touristic Media. User Centric Media Journal 40, 247–254 (2010)

8. Google Latitude, http://www.google.com/latitude 9. Wikitude, http://www.wikitude.com

10. Yow, K.C., Lee, J.: Mobile tourguide system. Singaporean-French IPAL Symposium (2009)

11. Becker, C., Bizer, C.: DBpedia Mobile: A Location-Enabled Linked Data Browser. In: Procs. of Linked Data on the Web (LDOW), Beijing, China, April 22 (2008)

12. CIDOC: International Committee for Documentation, http://cidoc.mediahost.org

13. Core Data Index to Historic Buildings and Monuments of the Architectural Heritage, http://archives.icom.museu/object-id/heritage/core.html

14. CIDOC Conceptual Reference Model (CRM), http://www.cidoc-crm.org 15. MIDAS Heritage,

http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/professional/ archives-and-collections/nmr/heritage-data/midas-heritage

16. LIDO - Lightweight Information Describing Objects, http://www.lido-schema.org/schema/v1.0/ lido-v1.0-schema-listing.html

17. Dublic Core Metadata Initiative, http://dublincore.org 18. SPECTRUM: The UK Museum Documentation Standard, 2nd edn. Cambridge, UK (1997) 19. The CARARE Project, http://www.carare.eu 20. Yeates, R.: COVAX: making visible the culture of Europe, Cultivate Interactive

(July 2002), http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue7/covax 21. Vlahakis, V., Karigiannis, J., Ioannidis, N.: Augmented Reality Touring of Archaeological

Sites with the ARCHEOGUIDE System, Cultivate Interactive (2003), http://www.cultivate-int.org/issue9/archeoguide

22. Empedia – Interactive Guide to the East Midlands, http://empedia.info 23. Resnick, P., Iacovou, N., Suchak, M., Bergstrom, P., Riedl, J.: Grouplens: An open archi-

tecture for collaborative filtering of netnews. In: CSCW, pp. 175–186 (1994) 24. Adomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A.: Toward the next generation of recommender systems: A

survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. IEEE Trans. on Knowledge and Data Engineering 17(6), 734–749 (2005)

25. Everyplace Mobile Portal, http://www-01.ibm.com/software/pervasive/ ws_everyplace_mobile_portal_enable


26. Apache Cocoon, http://cocoon.apache.org 27. MyMobileWeb, http://mymobileweb.morfeo-project.org 28. Alembik – Media Transcoding Server,

http://alembik.sourceforge.net/overview.html 29. Dilithium Content Adapter (DCA), http://www.dilithiumnetworks.com 30. W3C - Authoring Challenges for Device Independence,

http://www.w3.org/TR/2003/NOTE-acdi-20030901 31. Jung, Y., Behr, J., Graf, H.: X3DOM as carrier of the virtual heritage. In: Procs. of the

4th ISPRS Workshop 3D-ARCH 2011: 3D Virtual Reconstruction and Visualization of Complex Architectures, p. 8 (2011)

32. Cultural Heritage Assets through X3DOM, http://www.x3dom.org/?p=1989 33. 3DSSE – A 3D Scene Search Engine Prototype, http://www.ceti.gr/3dsse 34. Innoetics Text-to-speech prototype,

http://www.spellcastcloud.com/ttsotf/form_iguide.htm

lnai 8445 - iguide: socially-enriched mobile tourist guide...

Documents