Digital broadcasting for context-aware services in tourism

Tourism sciences represent a very active research field in Computer Science today. In particular, in the realm of ubiquitous computing. The evolution of mobile devices and their proliferation in society, the advancement of communication technologies and the trend toward creating hybrid spaces (symbiosis between nature and technology) will trigger a radical change in the way persons involved in mobility, visitors in operative terms, interact with their environment. Tourism is a well-suited application domain for contextual computing services, since visitors, can greatly benefit from being automatically assisted while on the move through their mobile devices. Existing applications are usually connected to sources of information by means of traditional communication technologies, which present the following limitations: firstly, the price of connection is relatively high, especially under roaming conditions (up to EUR 1 per Megabyte). Secondly, these technologies are real connection (pull) technologies, i.e. users have to actively search and retrieve the information they require. In addition to this, given that the amount of information on the Internet continually grows at exponential rates and the interaction restrictions posed by the small size of screens and keyboards in mobile devices, the question is: would there be a way to automatically send relevant information to visitors overcoming the aforementioned constraints? Considering this background, the paper explores the extent to which digital broadcasted tourism information can be contextualized to provide relevant context-based information to support human mobility. Its contributions are threefold. First, a new theoretic approach to the theory of context is proposed, which provides a new framework (named CONCERT) for contextual computing within the realm of human mobility. Secondly, CONCERT, suggests gathering contextual information from Web distributed and heterogeneous information sources. No external sensors - hall be used, except for the ones embedded in mobile devices. Content gathered in the Web will then be adapted for broadcast. This constitutes a substantial advancement with respect to existing context-aware approaches, since the use of applications in this case is not limited to sentient environments, i.e. they can be used anytime and anywhere, following the promises of ubiquitous computing. This is CONCERTS first level of interoperability. Thirdly, CONCERT implements an ontology-based model of context, using networks of ontologies in order to increase the models consistency, reasoning capabilities, modularity, interoperability, re-use and sharing. The ontology will particularly focus on modelling visitors according to tourism established vocabulary and will implement a rule-based reasoning engine to filter incoming broadcasted information. This constitutes CONCERTS second level of interoperability, i.e. interoperability at the model level. Both the technical and user experiments performed provide evidence that digital broadcasting may be processed by means of ontologies and that has a high degree of perceived usefulness by visitors.