Architecture for Including Personalization in a Mobile GIS via Semantic Web Techniques - Geographical Information Systems: Trends and Technologies - page 238

The experiment also shows that a reasonable explanation to the user is
necessary when a route is not provided. Such explanation should explain
why the system has not been able to provide any route. Accordingly, the
user can change some parameters to get a suitable route by changing the
type of restaurant, the start time or performing other minor adjustments.

Comparison with Existent Systems

After the results of the evaluation, we showed that the proposed CARS
offers personalized information to users considering their preferences and
the context of the visit, while running off-line in the smartphone.
This represents an advance in research in the tourism and GIS area
because currently there are systems that are not able to provide complete
routes with personalized data without requiring server connection.
As explained in Section “GIS in Smartphone”, there are location-aware
systems like OsmAnd or Google Maps that provide offl ine functionalities.
However, their off-line features are limited to: 1) provide simple routing
from one POI to another, and 2) provide lists of POIs ordered by type or
rating. Then, the applications display these data over a map. Therefore,
these applications do not offer a complete experience for the user, because
the fi ltering and the posterior decision of what places to visit must be done
by the user. Table 3 presents the comparison of off-line functionalities of
current context-aware systems.

Table 3. Comparison of off-line functionalities of current context-aware systems.

Application

OsmAnd Google Maps Itiner@

Base Map Raster maps Raster maps Raster maps

POI List of POIs List of POIs POIs ordered to create a route

Data
organization

Data are not
organized with
ontologies

Data are not
organized with
ontologies

Data are organized with
ontologies

User
preferences

Takes into account
only one selection
from the user

Takes into account
one selection from
the user

Takes into account multiple user
preferences

Timetables Does not take into

account time

Does not take into
account time

Takes into account the time for
recommendations

Routing Routing off-line Only re-routing

off-line

Routing off-line

Extra
information

Text information
from Wikipedia

Text and photos Shows multimedia content