A Service-Based Mobile Tourist Advisor

Abstract

This paper presents a service based mobile application that assists tourists traveling to a country. The application provides tourists with context-aware information adapted to their personalized requirements. Detecting the real needs of the tourist is based on context management which is a key element in our system – Murshid. Advice to tourists is proposed after sensing the context and a fine analysis of its ingredients. Murshid is designed as client-server architecture and it uses GPS based location to provide a visual aid using UAE map. Murshid is flexible, user-friendly, portable, and support dynamic information. The application offers a set of services to tourists through their mobile handsets, namely: special event notification, sightseeing, weather forecasting, currency exchange, language translation, and location bookmarking and sharing. Each of the services recommends tourism guidance according to the user’s context that is constantly changing since we are dealing with nomadic users. The application utilizes different context information to adapt its functionality according to the surrounding environment. This information can be spatial, temporal, or related to the environment. The context model includes the user location, the user profile, the current date, events related information, and user interaction. The paper presents the context model, the system architecture, the services implemented and offered, and an evaluation of the main functionalities of the system. It describes also how the context is managed in order to adapt the system functionality to the changes that may occur in order to react accordingly at the right time, at the right place and for the right person.