Smart dissemination and exploitation mobile services for carnival events

Abstract

The use of smartphone applications offering services to spectators of outdoor cultural events like carnival parades, prior, during and after the event could be a powerful tool to the hands of event organizers. A carefully designed mobile application that offers various services facilitating user participation in outdoor events and enhancing personal experience could make an event stand out from the rough competition and attract more spectators. In this work we propose a prototype system that tries to implement dissemination and exploitation activities for carnival events in a trustworthy and efficient way. The system offers carnival event organizers and local businesses the opportunity to increase sources of revenue by implementing various exploitation services. Moreover, the system attempts to create a vivid online community of individuals that communicate, exchange opinions and create personal experiences that share with the rest of the community, enriching carnival-related system content. An authorization mechanism is applied to all user content requests to prevent content misuse. The proposed system is compared to other applications concerning spectators of outdoor events based on offered services. Evaluation results suggest that the presented system is a first attempt towards a mobile system that supports carnival organizers to accomplish efficient event management, monitoring and administration, spectators to live an enhanced event experience and local markets to gain additional revenue.