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An innovative mobile electronic tourist guide application

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Abstract

“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 available, there are still open challenges with respect to design, usability, portability, functionality and implementation aspects. Most existing “mobile tourism” solutions either represent of-the-shelf applications with rigidly defined content or involve portable devices with networking capabilities that access tourist content with the requirement of constant airtime, i.e., continuous wireless network coverage. This paper presents the design and implementation issues of a “mobile tourism” research prototype, which brings together the main assets of the two aforementioned approaches. Namely, it enables the creation of portable tourist applications with rich content that matches user preferences. The users may download these personalized applications (optimized for their specific device’s model) either directly to their mobile device or first to a PC and then to a mobile terminal (through infrared or bluetooth). Thereafter, network coverage is not further required as the applications execute in standalone mode and may be updated when the user returns online. The dynamically created tourist applications also incorporate a “push model”, wherein new tourist content is forwarded to the mobile terminal with minimal user intervention as soon as it is added or updated by the administrator. Our prototype has been developed on the top of Java 2 Micro Edition (J2ME) which offers an ideal platform for the development of full-fledged, interactive and portable applications tailored for resource-constrained mobile devices. The paper presents our development experiences with J2ME and highlights its main advantages and shortcomings in relation to the implementation of such kind of applications. Finally, an empirical evaluation of user experience with the mobile application prototype is presented.

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Notes

  1. The Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) is a wireless web standard (released in 1997), backed by the entire telecommunication industry (through the WAP Forum). Essentially, WAP specifies a protocol stack used to submit and deliver data within the boundaries of a mobile/wireless network and a gateway that translates requests from the WAP protocol stack to the WWW stack and vice-versa, so they can be submitted to web servers.

  2. i-mode is a more recent, alternative to WAP, approach for the wireless Internet, which addresses the main weaknesses arisen with the practical implementation of WAP. In principle, i-mode is a service of wireless Internet (unlike WAP which is a protocol stack), with a large subscriber base in Japan. It has been released by the Japanese NTT DoCoMo in 1999.

  3. Recently, a number of WAP and i-mode official and unofficial services have emerged providing tourist, context-aware [21] and location-based services [45], for instance, the i-mode’s i-area [23] service.

  4. It is noted that only a portion of the web page content is included into the XML file. In particular, each content item is accompanied by a full and a short description. The former appears on the corresponding JSP page while the latter is retrieved from the backend database and appended to the XML file in the case that the user selects this item.

  5. In our implementation, the jar file is maintained for a period of 48 h. If the file is not downloaded within this period, it is automatically removed.

  6. Tests undertaken by members of our laboratory have shown that the majority of mobile phone users are reluctant in trying to upload a file to a mobile phone. In the future, we plan to create a stand alone application which via a bluetooth communication port will seamlessly push the jar file to the users’ mobile phones.

  7. Application management software (AMS) controls the management (start, pause, termination) of MIDlets execution as well as their installation/un-installation; AMS runs on the same device as MIDlets and is typically provided by the device’s manufacturer.

  8. J2ME Polish comprises a collection of tools for developing J2ME applications: build tools for creating application bundles for multiple devices and multiple locales; a device database that helps to adjust applications to different handsets; tools for designing GUIs using simple CSS text-files; utility classes.

  9. The Java SMS SDK is a 100% pure Java implementation that provides easy, high-level control of the Simplewire wireless text-messaging platform. The Java SMS SDK was designed be to be as developer-friendly as possible by hiding the intricacies of the XML format required to communicate with the Simplewire Wireless Message Protocol (WMP) servers. The Java SMS SDK makes it possible to send an SMS message off with as little as two lines of code.

  10. ProGuard is a free Java class file shrinker, optimizer, and obfuscator. It can detect and remove unused classes, fields, methods, and attributes. It can then optimize bytecode and remove unused instructions. Finally, it can rename the remaining classes, fields, and methods using short meaningless names. The resulting jars are smaller and harder to reverse-engineer.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Cultural Heritage Management Laboratory (CHMLab), Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Harilaou Trikoupi & Faonos St, 81100, Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece

    Michael Kenteris, Damianos Gavalas & Daphne Economou

Authors
  1. Michael Kenteris
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  2. Damianos Gavalas
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  3. Daphne Economou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Michael Kenteris.

Appendix: application design

Appendix: application design

This section includes a series of sequence unified modelling language (UML) diagrams that clarify our tourist application’s design and functionality. Figure 11 illustrates the use case for downloading the tourist application to the user’s mobile device. Figure 12 depicts the use case for the user—tourist application interaction, while Fig. 13 shows the use case for updating the tourist application with new content items selection. Finally, Fig. 14 presents the use case for pushing tourist content to the mobile tourist application.

Fig. 11
figure 11

Use case for downloading the tourist application to the user’s mobile device from the myMytileneCity web site

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Fig. 12
figure 12

Use case for the user-tourist application interaction

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Fig. 13
figure 13

Use case for updating the tourist application with new content items selection

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Fig. 14
figure 14

Use case for pushing tourist content to the mobile tourist application

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Kenteris, M., Gavalas, D. & Economou, D. An innovative mobile electronic tourist guide application. Pers Ubiquit Comput 13, 103–118 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-007-0191-y

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