An architecture for a self-adapting information
system for tourists
VASILIOS ZARIKAS1 , GEORGIOS PAPATZANIS1 , CONSTANTINE STEPHANIDIS1,2
1
Institute of Computer Science
Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas
Science and Technology Park of Crete
Heraklion, Crete
GR-71110 Greece
e-mail: {vzarikas, gpap, cs}@ics.forth.gr
2
Department of Computer Science, University of Crete
Abstract: The paper briefly describes the design of the architecture of the PALIO system (Personalised
Access to Local Information and services for tOurists), focusing on the support for extensive
adaptation. The framework provides a location-aware information system for tourists, capable of
delivering fully adaptive information to a wide range of devices, including mobile ones. Its open and
expandable architecture can integrate a variety of pre-existing or forthcoming services and retrieve
information from a collection of different databases. It supports adaptability and dynamic adaptivity,
according to user and context characteristics, both in the content and the presentation of information.
Introduction
The notion of universal access in the Information Society (Stephanidis et al., 1998;
Stephanidis & Emiliani, 1999) is rooted on the concept of universal design, as it has
evolved over the past decade. Universal design refers to the conscious effort to
consider and take into account the widest possible range of end-user requirements
throughout the development life-cycle of a product or service (Story, 1998). In recent
years, universal design has been applied in interior and workplace design (Mueller,
1998), housing (Mace, 1998) and landscapes (Story, 1998).
In the context of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), design for all implies a
proactive approach towards products and environments that can be accessible and
usable by the broadest possible end- user population, without the need for additional
adaptations or specialized (re-)design (Stephanidis & Emiliani, 1999). Building upon
the results of earlier projects, such as ACCESS 1 and AVANTI2 (Stephanidis et al.,
2001), the PALIO project sets out to address the issue of anyone and anywhere access
to community- wide services. This is an extension of previous efforts, as it
accommodates a broader perspective on adaptation beyond desktop access. In what
follows, we will briefly overview how this project addresses the issue of universal
access and how it advances the current state of affairs by considering novel types of
adaptation based on context and situation awareness.
The main challenge of the PALIO project is the creation of an open system for
accessing and retrieving information without constraints and limitations (imposed by
space, time, access technology, etc). Therefore, the system should be modular and
capable of interoperating with other existing information systems. In this scenario,
mobile communication systems play an essential role, because they enable access to
services from anywhere and at anytime.
One important aspect of the PALIO system is the support of a wide range of
communication technologies (mobile or wired) to access services. In particular, it will
be possible for a user, who is equipped either with a common cellular phone or an
advanced WAP phone, to access services from any place. This paper describes the
types of adaptation that the PALIO system exhibits, as well as the architecture that
supports the adaptation features specified below.
Adaptation and PALIO
The PALIO project proposes a new framework, which supports the provision of
tourist services in an integrated open structure. The framework under consideration is
capable of providing information from local databases in a user friendly and
personalised way. The design of the architecture supports the following concepts:
1
TIDE-ACCESS TP1001 project (Development Platform for Unified Access to Enabling Environments), funded
by the European Commission (DG XIII). The partnets in the ACCESS consortium are: CNR-IROE (Italy) - Prime
contractor; ICS-FORTH (Greece); University of Hertforshire (United Kingdom); University of Athens (Greece);
NAWH (Finland); VTT (Finland); Hereward College (United Kingdom); RNIB (United Kingdom); Seleco (Italy);
MA Systems & Control (United Kingdom); PIKOMED (Finland).
2
ACTS-AVANTI AC042 project (Adaptable and Adaptive Interaction in Multimedia Telecommunications
Applications), funded by the European Commission (DG XIII). The partnets in the AVANTI consortium are:
ALCATEL Siette (Italy) - Prime contractor; CNR-IROE (Italy); ICS-FORTH (Greece); GMD (Germany);
University of Sienna (Italy); MA Systems (UK); MATH-EMA (Italy); VTT (Finland); ECG (Italy); University of
Linz (Austria); TELECOM ITALIA (Italy); EUROGICIEL (France).
o Integration of wireless and wired technologies.
o Location awareness.
o Adaptation of the information content to meet user and context requirements.
o Adaptation of the user interface to meet user and context requirements.
o Context adaptation.
o Scalability of the information, and interoperability between the different
services provided.
Adaptation at the context level refers to:
o Awareness of the environment where the user interacts (location, time,
weather condition, noise, companions, description of the surrounding area).
o Awareness by the system of the particular device in use and proper response /
communication with the client application / platform that the tourist uses for
the communication.
o Awareness and reconciliation of bandwidths, of the status of wireless
communication (Cheverest et al., 1998), of switching between different
network providers (Ebling & Satyanarayanan, 1998), etc.
CONTENT
USER INTERFACE
CONTEXT
Adaptability Adaptivity
Figure 1: summarises the adaptation philosophy of PALIO
In PALIO, our aim is to construct a state of the art system that addresses the real
requirements of tourists for assisted guidance. While, the HCI research community
has successfully developed solutions for supporting the design of user interfaces for
“static” contexts of use, this is not yet the case for mobile computing and for nomadic
interaction (Johnson, 1998). PALIO attempts to provide solutions in this direction
building upon the Unified User Interface Architecture (Stephanidis, 2001). The latter
provides the required ground for the development of systems that are adaptable and
adaptive to the individual end- user requirements in different contexts of use.
Since the interaction situations are dynamically changing, there is an explicit need for
both “horizontal divergence” and vertical “specialisation” in the resulting response of
the system, so that it will be able to capture the range of user and usage-context
requirements). Therefore, different design alternatives will support the output, either
within or across interaction sessions (Stephanidis, 2001).
Applications for mobile computing must be designed to cope with the level of
uncertainty that is inevitably introduced (Rodden, 1998). This is true due to less
connection stability, less predictable availability, and more latency. This is one of our
motivations for employing adaptation via decision-making theory under uncertainty in
the PALIO project.
For agents that require simple decision making logic, common "if-else" structures
implemented with common programming, may suffice. However, the advanced
adaptation features that PALIO needs to develop require a more sophisticated
approach using knowledge representation frameworks, decision- making models based
on statistical reasoning and probabilistic based decision models. These models should
encompass learning, which results to intelligent decisions with better performance. In
addition, sometimes inferences should be made based only on incomplete knowledge
of all the relevant parameters.
There are, at a conceptual level, at least two types of adaptation that are realised in
PALIO: "global" adaptation rules that can be applied across services (e.g., adaptation
related to the output medium / modality); and "service specific" adaptations that are
only applicable in the context of a particular domain / service.
Location-aware mobile multimedia guides have been developed so far (Long et al.,
1996), (Davies et al., 1998), which provide information and interaction options
according to the location point. The PALIO project fully supports adaptivity and
adaptability according to the location point. The architecture of PALIO implements
adaptivity proactively. This feature not only leads to meaningful adaptivity, but also
accommodates user-centred design. Furthermore, it allows the enhancement of the
adaptive system with new user groups, new services and new interaction styles, after
the implementation.
There are a number of important differences between the PALIO system and other
contemporary tourist information systems. In the PALIO framework, the user client
module does not keep any databases for information retrieval and there is no special
pre-installed tourist client application in the devices. As a result, there are less
resource demands from the user client.
The components
The system consists of five main building units:
(i) The Service Control Centre (SCC) is the central block of the PALIO
system. It serves as the access point, getting the request from the user. It also
provides the runtime platform for the system information services.
(ii) The Generic Information Server (GIS) integrates existing or forthcoming
local databases and manages existing information and services, which will be
distributed over the network.
(iii) The Communication Layer. This module provides transparent
communication between the user and the PALIO system. It unifies over the
different communication protocols (WAP, http) and different terminal
devices (cellular phones, internet PC’s, kiosks, etc.)
(iv) The Adaptation Module is responsible for content and interface adaptation
in the PALIO System.
o The Adapter provides the decision- making component of the system. It
integrates information concerning the user, the context of use, the
access environment and the interaction history, and makes decisions in
order to adapt the information content and presentation accordingly.
o The User Model Server (UMS) integrates and manages information
concerning user characteristics (e.g., interests, interaction styles), in the
forms of both individual user profiles constructed during interactive
sessions, and user stereotypes for groups of users that share a number
of characteristics.
o The Context Model Server (CMS) assembles the context profiles, using
information retrieved from the Usage Context Repository, and informs
the adapter about the current context. It processes the information on
the customer positioning that comes from GPS device or the mobile
telecommunication network.
Workstation
Laptop
SIM toolkit
GPS device PDA Kiosk
PC
WAP/SMS
device
gateway
server
server
server
WAP
WAP
Mobile
IVR
Web
Telecommunication
Network
LOCALIZATION
communication layer
user
model user
server profile
making engine
SERVICE CONTROL
decision repository
CENTER
virtual
city service 1 virtual context
adapter
city service 2 model usage
virtual server profile
city service repository
adaptation
engine
localization
model
server
localization
repository
ontologies metadata
Commune Isola
Commune
di Siena di Creta
di Firenze
data data
data
Distributed Information Centers
Figure 2: The PALIO Architecture
Information and control flow
The steps numbered and described below are related to the flow of both control
commands and information contents in the system and analyse the various
functionalities supported in the proposed architecture.
1. The request from the client reaches the SCC by means of the HTTP protocol
through the communication layer. The communication layer transforms the
request in an XML file and passes it to the SCC.
2. The SCC acquires from this request all the necessary information to satisfy the
client (i.e., User Identification, User Agent, Location - for GPS devices- and
type of request). If necessary, SCC acquires the client position from the mobile
telecommunication network
3. The Adapter gets the information regarding the request, the user, the client
device, the client agent and the location and passes it to the user and the context
model servers. The adapter passes pieces of information describing parts of the
request to the decision making engine.
4. The user model and context model servers update the user profiles and the
context situations respectively, using the information coming from step 3.
5. The decision making engine, which holds adaptation rules (general and service
specific) and a decision making model, requests and gets from the user-context
model servers the appropriate user and context based information regarding
interests and attributes.
6. A decision made by the decision making engine is mapped to proper adaptation
actions regarding the construction of an adaptive request to the local databases.
7. The adaptation action is passed to the service control centre.
8. The request is adapted on the basis of the instructions coming from step 7 and
an XML query is formulated.
9. The request is analysed by the generic information server in order to formulate
the necessary query to interrogate the DB that contains the requested
information.
10. The queries are forwarded to the Data sources
11. The information that the GIS provides in XML format is now collected from the
SCC.
12. The response is assembled with the help of the instructions (adaptation actions
regarding presentation) passed into the SCC from the decision making engine.
This time, decisions have been made according to service specific and general
rules concerning the presentation of the content.
13. The XML response (XML file plus stylesheets) is generated and passed to the
communication layer in order to be transformed in the appropriate format
(HTML, WML, SMS).
Concluding remarks
We have briefly described how the design of the adaptation infrastructure of PALIO
seeks to advance a novel information system in tourist-oriented services. PALIO
constitutes a substantial extension over previous efforts on universal access, since it
introduces and explicitly accounts for novel types of adaptation and new interactive
encounters beyond the desktop. Accordingly, it pursues an architectural model of
interaction which is expected to be of wider applicability in service communities other
than tourism.
Acknowledgments
The PALIO project (IST-1999-20656) is partly funded by the Information Society
Technologies Programme of the European Commission – DG Information Society.
The partners in the PALIO consortium are: ASSIOMA S.p.A. (Italy) - Prime
Contractor; CNR-IROE (Italy); Comune di Firenze (Italy); FORTH-ICS (Greece);
GMD (Germany); Telecom Italia Mobile S.p.A. (Italy); University of Sienna (Italy);
Comune di Siena (Italy); MA Systems and Control Ltd (UK); FORTHnet (Greece).
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