Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
travel in different areas, the relationship between such areas is also essential
information to help users ind other travel topics on the Internet.
By accessing resources from users' mobile devices, we can obtain multime-
dia, spatial, and temporal information. Multimedia information is the basic
unit in the intelligent travel topic management system. After visitors captured
multimedia resources, spatial and temporal information are also generated.
By this information, we can approximately summarize the travel route of
visitors. A simple example of a travel route is shown in the following:
Location 1: Tamshui MRT station
08:00 1/13/2008
Location 2: Tamshui Old Street
08:20 1/13/2008
Location 3: TamKang University
09:00 1/13/2008
Location 4: Tamshui Fisherman's Wharf
10:00 1/13/2008
In the previous section, representative landmarks, and keywords are gen-
erated by an agent for gathering related information. The users can access
information of these four locations individually after they have finished
their journey.
With spatial and temporal information, users can find more precise
resources on the Internet. They may discover travel topics with similar travel
routes and make references in their next travel route arrangement.
To find a similar travel route is not a hard task for agents both on the Internet
and the server side. The travel topic agent searches related information by
landmarks and keywords. Travel topics published on the Internet with one
or more target keywords will be returned to the management server.
Discovering travel blogs by using only keywords may be not very efficient.
Another approach is searching travel topics in the management server. Since
users in the server use the same functions to produce travel topics with spec-
ified tags, comparison of travel routes can be easily made on the server side.
Besides landmarks or keywords, traveling time and sequence can also be
used for discovering similar travel routes.
13.3 The System Architecture
As mentioned in the introduction, the major components of the intelligent
travel topic management system are the wizard, the agent, and the manage-
ment server. Figure 13.1 shows the procedure for information collected from
users or the Internet and transferred to the management server. The wizard
is a program that runs on a user's PDA or other mobile device. The wizard
