Knowledge base approach for developing a mobile personalized travel companion

Nowadays with the proliferation of a panoply of smartphones and tablets on the market, almost everyone has access to mobile devices, which offers better processing capabilities and access to new information and services. Taking this into account the demand for new and more personalized services which aid users in their daily tasks is increasing. Current navigation systems lack in several ways in order to satisfy such demand, namely, accurate information about urban traffic in real-time, possibility to personalize the information used by such systems and also the need to have a more dynamic and user friendly interaction between device and traveler. In short, the current navigation systems were not designed to be intelligent enough to communicate their needs effectively to humans, and they are not intelligent enough to understand humans´ attempts to satisfy those needs. This paper presents an approach for developing a personalized mobility knowledge base to be used by a mobile travelling companion application, whose conversational interactions crowdsource information about the world for the purpose of providing highly specific assistance and recommendations to the user. The work presented here, is still part of on-going work currently addressed under the EU FP7 MobiS project. Results achieved so far do not address the final conclusions of the project but form the basis for the formalization of the MobiS domain knowledge along with the MobiS data models.