Global Positioning System Reference
In-Depth Information
On the other hand, current tourism applications have another
inconvenience: the amount of information provided may overwhelm users.
In places with several Points Of Interest (POIs) to visit, it is important to
choose the most relevant point of interest for the user. The user has to
choose where to go, and this choice is even more diffi cult when the user
has a very limited time. But once the POI is chosen, the user has to face a
great deal of information (pictures, comments and descriptions, etc.): and
decide which ones are relevant. Therefore, the tourism experience becomes
a “play of choices”, with a cost of choice that: 1) makes the user loses his or
her time; and 2) makes the user experience unsatisfactory when the choice
is not the most suitable for him or her (Gavalas et al. 2013).
Summarizing, actual geographic applications have several limitations:
the lack of a cellular network connection in some zones, the low battery
duration and the necessity to fi lter the useful information for each user
(personalization).
In order to overcome those drawbacks, we propose that a geographical
application should satisfy the following requirements:
1. Ability of working anywhere and at anytime. This can be achieved by
creating an application able to work completely off-line:
a Geographic
Information System (GIS) within a smartphone
.
2. Ability of preparing a visit suitable for the user, giving a satisfactory
user experience:
personalization
.
Thus, the research question dealt with in this chapter is: how can we
build a touristic GIS that works anywhere, anytime, consumes less battery
and provides personalized information for each tourist? To answer this
question we have to satisfy the aforesaid requirements.
To satisfy the fi rst requirement,
working off-line
, it is mandatory to
execute all the processes and to store all the relevant data in the smartphone.
Thus, we will need to adapt the software to smartphones.
To satisfy the second requirement,
personalization
, we need to provide
the user only with the suitable information to make a satisfactory user
experience. This goal can be achieved by using semantic web techniques. But,
once more, these techniques have to work within the smartphone itself.
This chapter faces the research question by designing a touristic GIS
architecture that satisfi es the stated requirements. The result is Itiner@,
which is a proof of concept of the presented architecture. The presented
architecture has the fundamentals of personalization and allows to build a
Context-Aware Recomender System (CARS, see Adomavicius and Tuzhilin
2011) through semantic information.
The main contribution of the chapter is to show the process used and
the drawbacks found: 1) to develop geographic applications able to work
off-line; 2) to manage semantic information in a smartphone; and 3) to
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