A mobile context-aware information system to support tourism events

The experience of a touristic visit is a learning process very fascinating and interesting: the emotions can change according to the interests of the individuals, as well as of the physical, personal and social-cultural context. Applications for a mobile environment should take advantage of contextual information, such as position, to offer greater services to the user. In this paper, it is introduced a Context Aware Approach for the tourism. This approach is based on a graphical formalism for the context representation, the Context Dimension Tree, which plays a fundamental role in tailoring the target application data according to the user information needs. In particular, the proposed system is made available to the user as an adaptive mobile application, which allows a high degree of customization in recommending services and resources according to his/her current position and global profile. For example, the system can guide the tourist in the discovery of a town proposing him/her events mainly interesting for the user. A case study applied to a Christmas event in Salerno, an Italian town, has been analyzed considering various users and an experimental campaign has been conducted, obtaining interesting results.