Context-based infomobility system for cultural heritage recommendation: Tourist Assistant—TAIS

Abstract

The paper presents an infomobility system (Tourist Assistant—TAIS) for supporting tourists in a region. The system solves both main tasks related to the infomobility concept: user actions analysis, preferences revealing, cultural heritage recommendation based on the preferences and current situation in the region, and provides the user with possible transportation means to reach the corresponding cultural heritage. Multimedia information about the cultural heritage includes: text description and images, and videos extracted from accessible Internet sources (such as Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Panoramio and YouTube). The system consists of a set of services joined together by a smart space that provides possibilities to organize semantic-based information exchange between these services using ontology-based approach. Services share information for joint solving the tourist’s task with the smart space. This information forms cultural space that is a model of physical space where the tourist is. The list of cultural heritage provided to the tourist is ordered by the special recommendation service that implements the ranking based on the collaborative filtering technique. Recommendations are based on ratings set by the tourists that use the system. To provide the tourist with different transportation means, the special transportation service has been developed. This service calls a taxi, finds ridesharing possibilities or calculates multimodal route by public transport based on the tourist preferences. The paper describes the service-based system architecture, services development, their ontologies, and implementation and evaluation. The prototype of the developed system is accessible for download in the Google Play market for Android device users.