Information Technology Reference
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- they all possess a rules engine, or “intelligent” components enabling the
actions that are to be carried out to be defined according to changes occurring in the
context;
- they are all based on a conceptual definition of the context enabling the
technical elements to be separated, which takes into account the context of
applicative elements that are sensitive to context. For the majority of solutions used
today, this abstraction is done with the help of an ontology of context;
- the consideration of the context can only be done via the definition and use of
predefined specific rules. An application can only react to the context, if it is
anticipated from the design stage that it will react, and it has been specified during
the creation of the application how to react.
These different constraints regarding the use of the notion of context in a
conceptual model being established, we will now present a type of context specific
to the field of transport, which is the consideration of the travel time experience of
users.
9.2.4.
User model and transport: consideration of users' travel time experience
In the field of transport, travel times have long been considered a waste of time
[FIC 70] during which the activities carried out, such as reading or talking to a
neighbor, are only done by the traveler to pass the time [ORA 97]. However, one
study [MAR 99] showed that the transport time was only perceived as wasted time
by 40% of users. From this observation, research sought to differentiate the act of
travel from the activities carried out during the trips [JEN 08], [LYO 05], [MOK 01]
and then to characterize the activities carried out during the travel times by grouping
them together in categories, in a heuristic vision of the issue.
Thus, an initial categorization [FLA 05] proposes distributing the activities
according to three groups:
- productive activities, such as reading, writing, etc.;
- relaxing and transition activities, such as listening to music, observing the
landscape, etc.;
- sociable activities, which enable travelers to start a communication with one or
more individuals.
Another possible categorization is that based on a sociological and
anthropological study carried out in the context of the Viatic.Mobilité project [VIA],
[UST 09]. The conclusions of this study, partly presented in Chapter 1, propose
