Context-Awareness in Mobile Tourist Guides

Abstract

Today’s tourists expect to get personalized access to tourism information at anytime, from anywhere with any media. Mobile tourist guides provide the user with such a ubiquitous access. The prerequisite for this is the notion of customization, requiring awareness of the applications context together with appropriate adaptation mechanisms. Currently, there is a proliferation of mobile tourist guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. This chapter sheds light on those approaches by identifying their strengths and weaknesses, thus providing the basis for next-generation mobile tourist guides. For this, an evaluation framework is used comprising detailed criteria for the two orthogonal dimensions of context and adaptation.