Mobile application to provide personalized sightseeing tours

International Journal of Academic Research in Accounting, Finance and Management Sciences

Having or making a trip is a very important component of everyday life. With the new technology, the trip recommendation accommodating the mobile tourist preferences possible and has become a new research area. This type of trip recommendation means planning the most appropriate trip route between locations, based on users' preferences. The purpose of this study brings a new solution to trip recommending for travellers to or residents of a place. For this manner, we examined other mobile applications to expose shortcomings and open features and services to be developed. Tmap is a location based application which enables tourists or any local users with a facility to explore and get information about nearby must see places according to his/her personal point of interest. In the application, the main categories are listed as shopping, architecture/parks, museums, natural places, food/drink/fun and historical places. The places were gathered together in each category according to necessities or interests of the user. The optimized route and direction which the applications displays to the user through an interface which was designed in order to fulfill user's requirements and demands in the best possible way.

2010

Recommendation systems have been growing in number over the last fifteen years. To evolve and adapt to the demands of the actual society, many paradigms emerged giving birth to even more paradigms and hybrid approaches. These approaches contain strengths and weaknesses that need to be evaluated according to the knowledge area in which the system is going to be implemented.

IET Software, 2012

This study deals with the problem of deriving personalised recommendations for daily sightseeing itineraries for tourists visiting any destination. The authors' approach considers selected places of interest that a traveller would potentially wish to visit and derives a near-optimal itinerary for each day of visit; the places of potential interest are selected based on stated or implied user preferences. The authors' method enables the planning of customised daily personalised tourist itineraries considering user preferences, time available for visiting sights on a daily basis, opening days of sights and average visiting times for these sights. Herein, the authors propose a heuristic solution to this problem addressed to both web and mobile web users. Evaluation and simulation results verify the competence of the authors' approach against an alternative method.

Proceedings of the 5th …, 2006

The use of mobile devices as electronic tourist guides represents a recent trend that brings the concept of 'mobile tourism' into the spotlight. While much of the underlying technology is already available, there are still open challenges with respect to design, usability, portability 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 browse tourist mobile portals with the requirement of constant airtime, i.e. continuous wireless network coverage. This paper presents a 'mobile tourism' research prototype which brings together the main assets of the two abovementioned approaches. Namely, it enables the creation of portable tourist applications with rich content that matches user preferences. The users may download these customizable applications 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. Our prototype has been developed on the top of Java 2 Micro Edition which offers an ideal platform for the development of fullfledged, interactive and portable applications tailored to resource-constrained mobile devices.

This study deals with the problem of deriving personalised recommendations for daily sightseeing itineraries for tourists visiting any destination. The authors' approach considers selected places of interest that a traveller would potentially wish to visit and derives a near-optimal itinerary for each day of visit; the places of potential interest are selected based on stated or implied user preferences. The authors' method enables the planning of customised daily personalised tourist itineraries considering user preferences, time available for visiting sights on a daily basis, opening days of sights and average visiting times for these sights. Herein, the authors propose a heuristic solution to this problem addressed to both web and mobile web users. Evaluation and simulation results verify the competence of the authors' approach against an alternative method.

International Journal of Information and Communication Technology Research, 2016

During the last decade, scholars have paid a lot of attention to the Mobile Recommender Systems in tourism industry. With reducing information overload and narrowing the results according to tourists' characteristics and conditions, these systems lead to the development of tourism industry. These recommendations are in the form of multimedia contents, context-aware services, comments and points of peer users, travel schedule and etc. Recent advances in mobile and computing technologies has created more opportunities for detailed and personal recommendations, through historical and contextual parameters. This paper studies Recommender System's models and techniques in order to propose a new architecture for a Recommender System in tourism. The proposed architecture uses hybrid filtering technique, contextual information of the user, and Model-View-Controller architecture. Also our proposed architecture covers many gaps in previous studies. After that, the design and implementation of a mobile phone application associated with this architecture was examined. Based on The 3-layered Model-View-Controller architecture and Client-Server architecture, its development has taken place. In addition to location and map services using Google Maps API, place suggestion services are offered to users, that here, a private host and domain is used.

2014

Recommender Systems (RS) have been extensively utilized as a means of reducing the information overload and offering travel recommendations to tourists. The emerging mobile RSs are tailored to mobile device users and promise to substantially enrich tourist experiences, recommending rich multimedia content, context-aware services, views/ratings of peer users, etc. New developments in mobile computing, wireless networking, web technologies and social networking leverage massive opportunities to provide highly accurate and effective tourist recommendations that respect personal preferences and capture usage, personal, social and environmental contextual parameters. This article follows a systematic approach in reviewing the state-of-the-art in the field, proposing a classification of mobile tourism RSs and providing insights on their offered services. It also highlights challenges and promising research directions with respect to mobile RSs employed in tourism.

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2011

Mobile tourist guides have attracted considerable research interest during the past decade, resulting in numerous standalone and web-based mobile applications. Particular emphasis has been given to personalization of services, typically based on travel recommender systems used to assist tourists in choosing places to visit; these systems address an important aspect of personalization and hence reduce the information burden for the user. However, existing systems fail to exploit information, behaviours, evaluations or ...

Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 2007

''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-theshelf 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 resourceconstrained 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. Keywords Tourist application Á Mobile devices Á Electronic tourist guide Á J2ME Á XML Á Web Á Push model Á Usability tests

Design, Implementation, and Emergent Applications, 2012

Mobile guides have been in the spotlight for the past decade or so and are becoming increasingly available in various forms to tourists visiting places. The majority of these guides are to be used via a network connection and some as proprietary standalone mobile applications installed on-device. Some are solely navigational assistants used in large cities for exploratory services and others are used indoors as museum guides. This research chapter studies three main categories of mobile applications, namely, mobile guides, web-to-mobile, and mobile phone navigational assistants, using a detailed set of evaluation criteria to extract design principles that can be used by application designers and developers.