Mobile Tourism Research Articles

TILES: classifying contextual information for mobile tourism applications

Purpose – The design of context‐aware mobile applications can be improved through a clear and in‐depth understanding of context and how it can be used to meet users' requirements. Using tourism as a case application, this paper aims to address the lack of understanding of context and tourists' goals.Design/methodology/approach – This is achieved through a literature review of existing research and focus groups to gather information needs for tasks commonly executed by tourists.Findings – This paper proposes the TILES (temporal, identity, location, environmental and social) model to define and classify five main contextual types, and properties associated with each type for tourism‐related applications. The TILES model (with 32 factors) derived from the analysis of the literature review is refined through inputs from two focus groups to incorporate an additional ten factors.Research implications/limitations – The TILES model can be generalised to support domains other than tourism, such as medical and edut...

모바일관광정보서비스의 특성이 만족도와 재사용의도에 미치는 영향

The study seeks to explore essential factors that influence tourists` continual usage intentions to mobile tour information services. The variables such as characteristics of tour information service, accuracy, interactivity, context, ubiquitous connectivity, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use were adopted from previous research and the hypotheses were developed on the basis of Davis`s Technology Acceptance Mode(TAM). The survey was conducted by users who have previously experienced mobile tourism information service. Structural equation modeling was used to Investigate the relationships between the factors. The results showed that interactivity, context, perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use were found to have a positive impact on satisfaction. In particular, interactivity and context were found to be the most significant factors that influence reuse intentions. It suggests that increasing context and interactivity to make tourist trust about accuracy, ubiquitous connectivity is better than increasing perceived usefulness and perceived easiness. The identified factors that influence continual usage intentions on mobile services can be useful for analyzing the market trends and suggesting industrial guidelines of mobile services.

Designing Participant-Generated Context into Guided Tours

This article presents an interdisciplinary framework for designing participant-generated context into guided tours. The framework has been developed in parallel to practice-led research in the design of mobile learning tours with young people based in London. The article draws on art, architecture and urbanism to outline productive concepts, ‘seeding’ and ‘threading’, which support mobilized learning in tours of the built environment. In this, context is explored as an active and dynamic idea in developing attributes of the mobilized learner in the design of tours around buildings and the built environment.

Exploiting Multi-Agent Systems in realizing adaptivity in the Mobile Tourist Domain

Ongoing developments in an array of mobile computing technologies have rendered the deployment of intelligent agents feasible on lightweight computational devices such as mobile phones. This development extends the Multi-Agent System (MAS) paradigm to a new frontier, opening up significant avenues of research in intelligent mobile computing, amongst others. To demonstrate the potential of this approach, the practical realization of adaptivity in two classic agent-based mobile computing applications is considered. Though focusing on the tourist domain, it is contended that the approach adopted is generalisable to a broad category of mobile computing applications.

Building a Mobile Tourist Guide based on Tourists' On-Site Information Needs

Mobile information services are gradually supplementing and may in the future even replace traditional information sources to support tourists during on-site stay. The scope of the article is to identify mobile information services, already in the preprototype phase, types and functionalities of which are most relevant to tourists during their urban destination stay. For this aim a user-centered approach using both focus groups and expert surveys is proposed. In addition, multiple regression based on acceptance data gathered from 705 tourists allows the deduction of potentially accepted mobile information services targeted to the specific destination use. Finally, by drawing on these results, the architectural framework as well as the various building and implementation steps of a mobile tourist guide called innsbruck.mobile are discussed.

Recommendations based on semantically enriched museum collections

This article presents the CHIP demonstrator 1 1 http://www.chip-project.org/demo/. for providing personalized access to digital museum collections. It consists of three main components: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard, and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the semantically enriched Rijksmuseum Amsterdam 2 2 http://www.rijksmuseum.nl. collection, we show how Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to (partially) solve three important challenges for recommender systems applied in an open Web context: (1) to deal with the complexity of various types of relationships for recommendation inferencing, where we take a content-based approach to recommend both artworks and art-history topics; (2) to cope with the typical user modeling problems, such as cold-start for first-time users, sparsity in terms of user ratings, and the efficiency of user feedback collection; and (3) to support the presentation of recommendations by combining different views like a historical timeline, museum map and faceted browser. Following a user-centered design cycle, we have performed two evaluations with users to test the effectiveness of the recommendation strategy and to compare the different ways for building an optimal user profile for efficient recommendations. The CHIP demonstrator received the Semantic Web Challenge Award (third prize) in 2007, Busan, Korea.

A PERSONALIZED TOURIST TRIP DESIGN ALGORITHM FOR MOBILE TOURIST GUIDES

Mobile tourist guides evolve towards automated personalized tour planning devices. The contribution of this article is to put forward a combined artificial intelligence and metaheuristic approach to solve tourist trip design problems (TTDP). The approach enables fast decision support for tourists on small footprint mobile devices. The orienteering problem, which originates in the operational research literature, is used as a starting point for modelling the TTDP. The problem involves a set of possible locations having a score and the objective is to maximize the total score of the visited locations, while keeping the total time (or distance) below the available time budget. The score of a location represents the interest of a tourist in that location. Scores are calculated using the vector space model, which is a well-known technique from the field of information retrieval. The TTDP is solved using a guided local search metaheuristic. In order to compare the performance of this approach with an algorithm that appeared in the literature, both are applied to a real data set from the city of Ghent. A collection of tourist points of interest with descriptions was indexed and subsequently queried with popular interests, which resulted in a test set of TTDPs. The approach presented in this article turns out to be faster and produces solutions of better quality.

Development and evaluation of a context‐driven, mobile tourist guide

PurposeThe behavior of tourists strongly depends on the availability and quality of information. Too little information as well as too much can be disorienting and forces many tourists to join the majority visiting major sights. This causes a few crowded places in contrast to many which are under‐utilized. A Destination Management Organization has the goal to spread tourists more evenly, whereas the tourists would like to enjoy the destination to its full potential according to their personal interests. The paper aims to focus on the issues surrounding the creation of a mobile tourist guide.Design/methodology/approachA field trial was conducted in the summer of 2005 to study the following questions as a precondition for the development: Is it possible to seed generic interest profiles in the mobile context that allow the accurate prediction of actual rankings? Are the interest profiles sufficiently diverse to base personalized tours on individual interest profiles instead of interest prototypes? How do personalized tours affect the spatial behavior of tourist? Three methods to elicit the generic preferences of tourist in the mobile context are compared with actual rankings using Spearman's rank order coefficient.FindingsThe diversity of the interest profiles is analyzed in various ways leading to the conclusion that personalized interest profiles are necessary. For the gathered profiles tours are computed and simulated in order to gain a first insight into the effect on the spatial behavior of tourists.Originality/valueThe dynamic tour guide is supporting both goals by means of pervasive computing based on the actual context which is defined by personal interests, location and schedule of a tourist. It enables a personalized, spontaneous and guided tour.

Recommendations Based on Semantically Enriched Museum Collections

This article presents the CHIP demonstrator for providing personalized access to digital museum collections. It consists of three main components: Art Recommender, Tour Wizard, and Mobile Tour Guide. Based on the semantically enriched Rijksmuseum Amsterdam collection, we show how Semantic Web technologies can be deployed to (partially) solve three important challenges for recommender systems applied in an open Web context: (1) to deal with the complexity of various types of relationships for recommendation inferencing, where we take a content-based approach to recommend both artworks and art-history topics; (2) to cope with the typical user modeling problems, such as cold-start for first-time users, sparsity in terms of user ratings, and the efficiency of user feedback collection; and (3) to support the presentation of recommendations by combining different views like a historical timeline, museum map and faceted browser. Following a user-centered design cycle, we have performed two evaluations with users to test the effectiveness of the recommendation strategy and to compare the different ways for building an optimal user profile for efficient recommendations. The CHIP demonstrator received the Semantic Web Challenge Award (third prize) in 2007, Busan, Korea.

RTLS와 2D 바코드를 응용한 모바일 관광정보 제공 시스템의 구현 방안

최근 Mobile을 이용한 컨텐츠 및 정보제공은 일반 대중들에게 보편화 되고 있다. 이미 모바일 환경은 단순 '휴대용 전화 시장' 이상의 의미를 가지고 있으며 특히 정보를 탐색하고 선택하는 도구로서 컨텐츠를 활용하는 소비자가 늘고 있다. 특히 소비자의 욕구의 다양화는 Hardware와 Software, 미디어, 컨텐츠의 개발과 컨버젼스를 가속화 시키고 있다. 관광정보는 관광상품에 대한 정보로서 관광객이 관광의사결정을 하는데 필요한 정보를 말한다. 이러한 정보가 밀착형 미디어인 모바일을 이용하여 제공되는 방안들이 제시되고 있다. 그리고 최근의 모바일 기술의 페러다임은 하드웨어적인 컨버젼스와 위치기반 서비스측면의 인텔리젼트 기준점, RTLS, 또한 이를 응용한 디지털 콘텐츠에 초점이 맞춰지고 있다. 본 연구에서는 모바일 관광정보를 이해하고 이를 제공하는 시스템의 구현을 상기한 기술 중 RTLS와 2D바코드를 활용한 Pinpoint 관광정보 제공 시스템을 제안하며, 이를 경영학적 관점에서의 비용 효용성 측면과 효과를 중심으로 논의하고자 한다. Having been speed development of information delivery using the mobile phone, it is generalization. The Mobile has one of the importance for their information searcher as tool. It is widely recognized that tourism information can be defined as useful and reliable reference which significantly influence the traveler' decision-making. This paper presents pioneer and ongoing study of the method for the pinpionting mobile tourism information system with RTLS, 2D Barcode and mobile phone itself. And, this paper relief that benefit and influence of TCO a view on the business administration points.

An innovative mobile electronic tourist guide application

"Mobile tourism" represents a relatively new trend in the field of tourism and involves the use of mobile devices as electronic tourist guides. While much of the underlying technology is already av...

Information Search with Mobile Tourist Guides: A Survey of Usage Intention

As mobile tourist guides show huge potentials to support tourists’ information search, executives need to know which mobile systems characterized by which specific functionalities should be provided. The paper proposes an empirical approach combining qualitative and quantitative methods to deduce both, product definition and product marketing information related to mobile tourist guides, respectively. First, a methodology-mix combining qualitative (i.e. explorative survey, focus group interviews) and quantitative techniques (i.e. pilot study, expert interviews) responds to the question ‘Which services should be developed?’ Secondly, again in the pre-prototype phase and based on survey data (N = 705) ideal functionality compositions for promising tourist guides are deduced with regression analysis. Finally, based on technology acceptance theory (Venkatesh et al., 2003a) customer prejudices towards mobile tourist guides are identified. The obtained results support hypotheses indicating strong performance expectations and pronounced effort expectancies towards the deduced concepts designed to support information search by means of mobile tourist guides

The Mobile Tourist Guide: An OR Opportunity

Nowadays, an average tourist plans a vacation using web sites, magazine articles and guidebooks. The inability to modify this holiday plan in real-time motivates the need for a Next Generation Mobile Tourist Guide (MTG). The MTG, a handheld embedded device, is aware of the tourist's preferences, attraction values and trip information. Based on real-time and reliable data, the device can immediately suggest new integrated holiday plans. To develop these holiday plans, additional OR research and very specific decision models are required. In this paper, the Tourist Trip Design Problem (TTDP) is defined as an extension of the Orienteering Problem (OP).

모바일 상황인식 추천맛집 서비스 개발

이동통신망 고도화와 유비쿼터스 센서 네트워크 기술 개발에 따라 상황인지 기반 신규 서비스 모델이 개발되고 있다. 이동통신사업자는 셀 기반의 위치정보를 이용한 친구 찾기 서비스 GPS 위치정보를 이용한 텔레매틱스 서비스 등을 제공하고 있고 최근에는 셀 기반의 위치정보 서비스를 이용한 114 서비스를 제공하고 있다. 본 논문에서는 이동통신망에서 위치정보와 상용자 정보를 이용한 모바일 상황인지 맛집 추천 서비스를 위피 플랫폼을 이용하여 개발하였다. 개발된 모바일 상황인지 맛집 추천 서비스는 이동통신망의 LBS(Location Based Service) 플랫폼으로부터 사용자 위치정보, 유선 웹 서버로부터 계절, 시간, 기상 등의 상황정보, 데이터베이스에 저장된 개인 선호 정보 등을 이용하여 최적의 맛집을 추천한다. 개발된 맛집 추천 서비스는 관광 정보 시스템과 연동하여 텔레매틱스 핵심 서비스로 제공할 수 있다. Mobile network evolution and development of USN technologies introduce new business model based on context awareness. Cellular operators provide friend finding service using cell based location information and telematics service using GPS location information. Recently cellular operators provide yellow page service based cell based location information. In this paper, we develop mobile tour application on WIPI platform based on location information. Mobile tour information services provide the best information based on context awareness using user location information from LBS(Location Based Service) Platform, season, weather conditions, time from Web server, and personal preference information stored in database. Mobile tour information service application is developed on WIPI platform.

Using a Mobile Phone Tour to Visit the Ueno Zoological Gardens and the National Science Museum in Tokyo, Japan

Japanese mobile phones are increasingly being used as multimedia players. In response to this, some museums in Japan have introduced mobile phone audiovisual guides. This paper presents a trial run of a cross-institutional mobile phone audiovisual guide tour at Ueno Zoological Gardens and the National Science Museum in Tokyo, Japan. Easy-to-understand guide pages accessed by a mobile phone feature exhibit highlights and make connections between the zoo and the museum. Comments from visitors suggested the importance of the usability of the mobile phone and its small screen as well as of the opportunity to enrich users' museum experiences by taking a mobile phone tour.

Integrating heterogeneous adaptation techniques to build a flexible and usable mobile tourist guide

Intelligent adaptation is a key issue for the design of flexible support systems for mobile users. In this paper we present UbiquiTO, a tourist guide which integrates different forms of adaptation:...

Tourists’ perceptions and their willingness to pay for park fees: A case study of self-drive tourists and clients for mobile tour operators in Moremi Game Reserve, Botswana

Moremi game reserve (MGR) in northern Botswana is one of southern Africa's most popular destination because of its impressive wildlife and wilderness areas. To maintain the wilderness nature of the park and game reserve, the Government has pursued a policy of high cost-low volume which is not necessarily based on demand and supply characteristics of the tourist market. The present study determines the perceptions of self-drive tourists and clients of mobile tour operators on the prevailing park fees in MGR and uses the contingent valuation method to determine their willingness to pay (WTP) for park fees under a management scenario in which the management of the game reserve would be improved by a hypothetical international conservation organization. Data collection involved a self-fill of a questionnaire by these tourists in the game reserve. In the first scenario the mean entrance and camping suggested by non-residents was higher than the prevailing fee. Residents suggested a lower entrance fee. In the hypothetical scenario, the mean maximum WTP for entrance and camping fee for South African and overseas tourists were higher than in the first scenario. There was a significant difference in the WTP for entrance fee between overseas tourists and South African tourists (p<0.05). Overall expenditure was significantly related to the WTP for increased park fees. The paper concludes by suggesting improvement in the MGR's facilities for better satisfaction of tourists.

Context-aware platform for mobile data management

Interaction design is a major issue for mobile information systems in terms of not only the choice of input/output channels and presentation of information, but also the application of context-awareness. To support experimentation with these factors, we have developed platforms to support the rapid prototyping of multi-channel, multi-modal, context-aware applications. The Java-based platform presented here is based on an integration of a cross-media link server and an object-oriented framework for advanced content publishing, along with a Client Controller and Context Engine. We also describe how this platform was used to develop a mobile tourist information system for an international arts festival where interaction was based on a combination of interactive paper and speech output.

Toward a Multidisciplinary Model of Context to Support Context-Aware Computing

Capturing, defining, and modeling the essence of context are challenging, compelling, and prominent issues for interdisciplinary research and discussion. The roots of its emergence lie in the inconsistencies and ambivalent definitions across and within different research specializations (e.g., philosophy, psychology, pragmatics, linguistics, computer science, and artificial intelligence). Within the area of computer science, the advent of mobile context-aware computing has stimulated broad and contrasting interpretations due to the shift from traditional static desktop computing to heterogeneous mobile environments. This transition poses many challenging, complex, and largely unanswered research issues relating to contextual interactions and usability. To address those issues, many researchers strongly encourage a multidisciplinary approach. The primary aim of this article is to review and unify theories of context within linguistics, computer science, and psychology. Summary models within each discipline are used to propose an outline and detailed multidisciplinary model of context involving (a) the differentiation of focal and contextual aspects of the user and application's world, (b) the separation of meaningful and incidental dimensions, and (c) important user and application processes. The models provide an important foundation in which complex mobile scenarios can be conceptualized and key human and social issues can be identified. The models were then applied to different applications of context-aware computing involving user communities and mobile tourist guides. The authors' future work involves developing a user-centered multidisciplinary design framework (based on their proposed models). This will be used to design a large-scale user study investigating the usability issues of a context-aware mobile computing navigation aid for visually impaired people.

Spaces of Containment and Revenue Capture: ‘Super-Sized’ Cruise Ships as Mobile Tourism Enclaves

This paper explores the notion that cruise ships can be conceptualized as spaces of containment. The cruise ships that perhaps best exemplify containment are ‘super-sized’ cruise ships. In this paper, super-sized cruise ships are defined as vessels that can accommodate more than 2,000 tourists. These ships are built for the purpose of revenue capture. In fact, they could be viewed as travel destinations since they have become places where many tourists are inclined to spend their time and money. Tourists on board a super-sized cruise ship may also have the opportunity to spend time and money at a private island or beach operated by the cruise-ship company. There are several cruise-ship companies that have rented or purchased private islands and beaches in the Caribbean that serve as port destinations for cruise ships. These islands and beaches, similar to super-sized cruise ships, are spaces of containment. Tourists, it should be noted, are not the only individuals who experience containment. There are also cruise-ship employees to consider; cruise ships and private islands are contained and confined workplaces that operate in accordance with strict rules and restrictions. Perhaps the ultimate contained environment that is seaborne and built for pleasure travel is The World of ResidenSea, a recently constructed condominium cruise ship. That this ship represents an extreme mode of containment is discussed in this paper.