Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Wizard
Application layer
Operating System
APIs
Hardware resources
Camera and GPS
Figure 13.2
Architecture of intelligent travel topic wizard.
There is other information from the above-mentioned multimedia
resources; it is the temporal and spatial information. After the user captured
a picture via a mobile device, the wizard can get the time stamp when the
picture is taken. The time stamp helps the user to manage these multimedia
resources. They can browse and access these resources according to the time
of each picture. For an example, pictures could be classified into the first,
second, and final day of a journey. For pictures that belong to the same day,
there would also be temporal relationships between them. By the temporal
relationship, the wizard can have a simple way to classify these pictures if
the time difference is over a threshold (i.e., the pictures could be taken at dif-
ferent locations).
The final information collected from users is spatial information. This
kind of information is the most important part of the users' information.
The wizard gets the spatial information by accessing GPS component in a
PDA with GPS, the wizard can get coordinates like latitude and longitude.
The information captured from GPS is not the final version that will be
transferred to an agent for further usage. The wizard needs to perform some
procedures to transform such information to useful data.
One objective of the wizard is to locate visitors. By using the GPS compo-
nent in a PDA, the wizard can get simple coordinates of the users. For further
analysis by the agent, the wizard needs to transfer simple coordinates to a
string of landmarks. With the advanced functions provided by the GPS, the
wizard will get a different kind of information in the form of a string. The
final task of the wizard is to find landmarks near users and transfer them to
agents for advanced reference web page searching.
Landmark is the basic unit we used for gathering related information.
The wizard needs to find all possible landmarks near users first. It can be
easily achieved by the GPS component. Landmarks, buildings, and other
meaningful objects will be shown to users if an adequate range is assigned.
With the coordinates and a predecided surrounding area, several objects
around visitors will be stored in the cache of the PDA. The landmarks will
be used as keywords for an agent to gather reference web pages from the
Internet. Not all landmarks are useful for users to create their travel topics.
A landmark selection engine is used for filtering unnecessary objects.
Figure 13.3 illustrates a dataflow about the filtering process of landmark
selection engines. An example might have three candidate landmarks. But
