The process of selection, configuration and consumption of tourist information services is a complex task for the user. This is not least since existing tools most often focus on supporting either the pre- or post-trip phase or the on-trip phase itself by providing context-aware services. The goal of this thesis is to establish a framework that makes pre-trip services context-aware, thus reducing the gap between the pre-trip and on-trip phase by providing a single point of access. This is done by facilitating service selection and configuration in the pre-trip phase and context-aware service consumption in the on-trip phase. Its applicability and feasibility will be proved by a working prototype and evaluated through field studies.
Tourism is an information intensive business. Since tourism
products are virtual products prior to consumption, travelers
depend heavily on tourism information. In the ideal case, tourism
services should support tourists with travel-related information
during all phases (pre-trip, on-trip, post-trip phase) of the tourist
life cycle [
In the pre-trip phase, tourists need information for planning purposes and decision making. After their trip, focus is on reminiscing about the journey and sharing the gained impressions and experiences with friends. In the on-trip phase, however, tourists are mobile and act in unknown environments where they would especially need personalized on-trip assistance in the form of information about accommodation, points of interest (POIs) (e.g., environmental and landscape attractions or gastronomy), weather forecasts, news or safety issues. Mobile services, i.e., services that can be used independently of temporal and spatial constraints and that are accessed through a mobile handset, may address these issues. They have the task to satisfy information requirements of tourists while being on the move by providing them with a broad range of up-to-date, situation-specific information. This information may be in addition adapted to the current situation of the user by exploiting user preferences, user location as well as mobile handset capabilities.
In the last years, research has been very active in each of the
phases of the tourist life cycle. Research in the pre- and post-trip
phase is closely linked to online travel communities [
The goal of online tourism communities is the provision of
up-todate, freely available tourism-related content, thereby enabling
members to collect, view and exchange data items such as blog
entries or pictures or to add own content and reviews. They
provide good support for the pre- and post-trip phases but fail to
support tourists sufficiently during the on-trip phase. A few
communities such as the Tripadvisor1 or the Yahoo Trip Planner2
enable their users to download or print the personal trip plan, but
do not provide support to access this information in a way suitable
for mobile phones. Support for dynamic, on-the-move
information is rare. Customization, i.e., adapting the information
content towards the current context, is missing at all. As they only
provide services which are useful before and after the trip and
which are not interlinked to the on-trip phase, tourists have to use
other sources to satisfy their information requirements while they
are on vacation. Online tourism communities often provide
personal trip planner tools (cf. e.g., [
Research with respect to the on-trip phase has resulted in a wide
range of mobile tourist guides. Since one of the first famous
prototypes [
The goal of this thesis is to make pre-trip services context-aware, thus reducing the gap between the pre-trip and on-trip phase by providing a single point of access for these two phases (cf. Figure 2).
In the pre-trip phase, tourists should have the possibility to select and configure those tourist services that appear useful to them later in the on-trip phase. In the on-trip phase, the pre-configured services can then provide personal information that is tailored to the current situation and requirements of the tourist and presented on the mobile device of the user.
In the following, this visionary goal is presented by describing possible scenarios from a tourist’s point of view. The vision might include many assumptions. We want to point out that it is not goal of this PhD to work on all these visionary service descriptions, but some of them will be realized within a working prototype. The envisioned system is called virtual tourist agent (VTA) since it should provide tourists the same comfort as if they would call their personal travel agent at home to satisfy their information requirements.
The show case gives some impression how the support of tourists in the pre-trip phase and during the vacation can be realized.
In the pre-trip phase, tourists often do not plan all the activities
they intend to undertake in advance, they rather follow an
optimistic approach. For this, the VTA provides a trip-planner
tool to establish a rough schedule that contains the cities/places
they want to visit within a certain timeframe and the route
between those places. Next, the tourists can identify and select all
the tourist information services that they need later in the on-trip
phase. Possible services include a flight information service, a
tourist attraction service or a weather service. In [
The customisation dimension expresses to which extent the information sent to the user is customized to fit the requirements of the respective user by taking into account various context factors.
Concerning the initiation of delivery, services can be classified into pull and push services. Pull services are characterized by a user-triggered search whereas push services deliver information to the user automatically.
For example, the user can select the weather service and configure it to push (service initiation) the up-to-date weather forecast (service delivery) every morning to the mobile device of the user, filtered to the destination of the user (customization).
Since a mobile device suffers from several limitations, e.g., small screen and network connection with low bandwidth, it is important to limit the amount of information that is presented to the tourist so that he or she can obtain the essential information in a non-intrusive way. After all, the mobile device should function as an assistive tool for the current task (e.g., sightseeing) and should not require full attention of the user. To fulfill this purpose, an automation of service delivery and decision making is required. This is done based on the definition and evaluation of rules that may partly be defined by the tourist. These rules are checked by the VTA in order to deliver only relevant information, leading to a more fulfilling user experience. For example, the tourist can define the rule that the VTA should contact him/her in security-related issues, e.g., he or she booked a flight to a country where an earthquake happened (security issue), so that he or she can decide to re-book the flight to another destination. In case of re-booking, the VTA may automatically cancel the accommodation booking on behalf of the user (if he defined another rule concerning this issue).
During the on-trip phase, tourists receive support from the VTA
based on the service selection and configuration done in the
pretrip phase. This means that they obtain information from all the
services that have been configured to act in a push-based manner.
Further, the situation of the tourist (comprising context factors
such as location, time, user profile and travel schedule) is
constantly checked by the VTA to detect reactive situations [
In the following, we report on state of the art in e-tourism by discussing research on online travel communities that focus mainly on the pre- and post trip phase and research in the field of mobile tourist guides, covering the on-trip phase.
Concerning online travel communities, we evaluated in [
Several surveys on mobile tourist guides have already been
published that evaluate mobile tourist guides not in terms of
provided services but focusing more on the technical side such as
architecture, user interaction or context-awareness. In [
As already mentioned, the goal of this work is to find a satisfactory solution for making pre-trip services context-aware. To reach this goal, an approach based on the design-science paradigm (cf. e.g., Hevner et al (2004)) is used. The designscience paradigm seeks to create knowledge and understanding of a problem domain and its solution through the building and application of innovative design artifacts. Thereby, artifacts are defined not only as the resulting instantiations (working prototype), but also comprise constructs (vocabulary), models (abstractions & representations) and methods (algorithms & practices) applied in the development as well. To demonstrate the applicability and feasibility of this work, the VTA system will be implemented as a working prototype. For its development, several other design artifacts are needed that will be outlined in detail in section 5. These artifacts further contribute to the knowledge in the field of e-tourism. The goal of design-science research is to address unsolved problems in innovative ways and to address solved problems in more effective and efficient ways. This goal is targeted by this thesis through an innovative approach that facilitates service selection, configuration and consumption through a single point of access. The effectiveness and utility of the VTA prototype will be assessed by a field study with tourists and compared to other systems that target the pre- or on-trip phase in isolation.
The main contribution is the design of a conceptual framework and the prototypical implementation of the VTA system. Thereby, it is not the goal to implement each component from scratch, but to implement the whole system by heavily reusing and combining existing tools. Figure 3 illustrates the architecture of the VTA system. In the following, the architecture is explained by describing its components and listing research tasks that have to be addressed to develop the whole system.
In the pre-trip phase the user can select and configure all relevant service types and choose the adequate service providers from which the data is obtained during the on-trip phase. The service instances abstract from the different application programming interfaces (APIs) of the service providers and are linked over a standardized interface to the respective service type. For example, the service type “weather” can access weather service providers using different technologies, ranging from SOAP and restful web services to RSS feeds and finally to wrappers that extract the data from the provider’s website if an API is not available. The different symbols of the service providers act as representatives for the different technologies that can be used to access the data. In the runtime phase, the VTA system exploits the situation of the tourist and manages the states of the service providers in order to detect changes that require an action on behalf of or sending some information to the user. The main components of the VTA framework are described in the following. For this, Figure 4 shows a high-level view on the components of this framework. Context-aware information systems have to derive meaningful information based on the situation of the user. Ontologies are a promising technology to model the situation of the user since they can represent the knowledge in a semantically rich kind and are therefore a central part of the system. In the pre-trip phase, the VTA needs to include a trip planner tool that assists in trip planning. A survey has to be done to select a promising trip planner tool that can be integrated within the VTA. The trip planner of the destination portal of New Zealand6 seems to be a good starting point.
In our previous work [
The framework provides access to different context factors such as location time or profile of the user that are provided by the system or by the user or even external context factors such as weather information. As soon as a context change happens, either triggered by the user (e.g., location change), by the system (e.g., time) or by external providers (e.g., weather), the context manager forwards this event to the rule engine.
The rule engine consists of an inference engine and a dependency checker. The inference engine takes the request from the user and the events from the context manager and matches them with the knowledge base that contains the situation of the user and his/her travel plan. In this way, the inference engine uses axiomatic knowledge in the knowledge base to derive new conclusions. For example, when the context manager sends a bad weather event for the next day, the rule engine checks all outdoor activities taking place next day and apply some actions on them based on predefined rules (such as canceling those actions). The activities in the travel plan show complex dependencies amongst each other. For example, if the user plans to stay at a certain destination for another day in order to attend a concert (new activity), this new activity might be dependent on the possibility to stay another night in the booked hotel. If the user already booked a hotel at another destination for this day, this has to be canceled as well. It is the task of the dependency checker to monitor coherent activities.
The workflow manager encapsulates all different services as workflow components. The workflow manager receives from the rule engine the information about those services that have to be called in order to perform the actions defined in the rule engine and composes the respective services to a workflow (e.g., cancel hotel, send confirmation in form of SMS to the user). 6 http://www.newzealand.com/
Future work concentrates on detailing the architecture and the necessary components. Based on the design decisions, e.g., heavy-weight vs. light-weight client, existing tools, middleware and frameworks have to be selected that facilitate the design of the conceptual architecture and the implementation of the resulting prototype. Surveys are needed to select the suitable tools and adapt them in a later step for our work. The system will be implemented based on a rapid prototypical approach, which allows testing the prototype in small, iterative steps in order to get fast feedback for further improving the prototype.