Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
13.1 Introduction
The intelligent travel topic management system is designed for helping
visitors to manage and edit multimedia resources generated from their jour-
neys. Since users always focus on enjoying impressive buildings, natural
scenery, and outdoor attractions, using a mobile device works best to han-
dle multimedia information. On a tour, visitors always take pictures using
their cameras, video cameras, or other mobile devices. In this case, users
prefer making simple operations rather than complex ones since editing
such multimedia resources and uploading them to webpage servers is not
the most important task when they are sightseeing. With such requirements,
we developed an intelligent travel topic management system to help users
easily keep and manage their multimedia resources obtained on a journey.
Several major components are included in this system: the client application,
the agent, the server platform, and the interfaces for management.
The mobile client application is a first-line component to users. On a jour-
ney, visitors can carry a PDA to capture images or videos. Like other appli-
cations run on a PDA, a program called intelligent travel topic wizard will
help users to make easy operations to those multimedia resources. Users
can use this wizard to process captured images and add some comments if
necessary. Combining with the Global Positioning System (GPS) installed
on the PDA, the wizard will transfer these images or video files, personal
annotations, and coordinates of the event automatically. So visitors can focus
on experiencing wonderful scenes on their journey without worrying about
the procedures on managing photos and videos. Images, videos, and com-
ments will be packaged and transferred to a server automatically. Location
information provided by a GPS component is also uploaded to the server
side. Such resources will be analyzed in advance to help visitors edit their
own travel topics after they inish their journey.
Agent technology plays an important role in the developed intelligent travel
topic management system. Information captured from users is uploaded to
the server side. Such information is composed of image, video, audio, and
textual comments. It is not easy or convenient if the user does not have such
a system. In contrast, users can edit their travel topics via interactive inter-
faces with the system. If the authors need more information and materials
from the Internet, they need to browse web pages using searching engines.
It is not convenient for visitors to collect such information from the Internet
to augment contents of their own travel topic. The intelligent travel topic
agent will collect information and materials from the Internet automatically.
But, how do agents collect appropriate information to help users to edit their
own travel topics? According to the location coordinates provided by GPS
component in the users' PDA, the agent can get information around the loca-
tion of the users. Furthermore, the agents can obtain textual data like names
of scenes or buildings and use such data to collect textual and multimedia
