CONCERT: A New Framework for Contextual Computing in Tourism to Support Human Mobility

Human mobility today is central in societies and its comprehension is essential to understand the current way of life. Recently, intensive scientific efforts have been invested in better understanding this phenomenon. At the same time and linked with human mobility, eTourism represents a very active research field in Computer Science. In particular, in the realm of ubiquitous computing. The evolution of mobile devices and their proliferation in society, the advancement of communication technologies and the trend towards creating hybrid spaces (symbiosis between nature and technology) will trigger a radical change in the way persons en route, "visitors" in operative terms, interact with their environment.;In the near future most of these people will have spent a large part of their (adult) lives in the digital era. Time will continue to be an increasingly scarce resource, and occasional visitors of this kind will demand anytime, anywhere kinds of services adapted to both their personal and environmental contexts. Therefore, context-based applications will not only shape the future of tourism services, but also provide with the opportunity to better understand human behaviour in the future knowledge society.;Considering this background, the work developed within this dissertation suggests a new approach to the theory of context. Starting from an analysis of the intrinsic characteristics of human mobility, the objective is to work on a model that meets the contextual needs and requirements of visitors. Thus, the difficulty lies in determining what information is necessary to define visitors' context: which is the minimum amount of that information required, where that information is and how it can be effectively and practically retrieved to be subsequently processed.;To tackle this problem a new definition of the notion of context is proposed. The new conception implies new context requirements in terms of information and sources of information necessary. This way, populating whole areas, cities or regions with sensors would just not be affordable. Therefore, the approach this work takes, proposes to use other sources of (contextual) information that are hosted in digital environments, i.e. in the Internet. These new sources of information do not require specific and expensive infrastructures from an economic and implementation points of view. The information gathered from the Internet will then be completed with data coming from the mobile device embedded location sensors and with information provided by visitors themselves.;In addition, this work suggests to experiment with a particular communication technology, which is not new but has never been used for disseminating neither contextual nor tourism information: digital broadcasting. The information received by mobile devices will be processed according to semantic-based rules implemented on top of a network of ontologies. The rules filter incoming information, they classify it and then only display the information that is really relevant for visitors given their current context, i.e. according to the specific context values, that have been established by the new definition of context.;Thus, some of the restrictions of current approaches to context-awareness are overcome: Firstly, the model suggested focuses on visitors instead of on particular systems running in specific environments. Secondly, visitors are modelled according to various parameters that have been validated by the tourism scientific community. And thirdly, sensors do not restrict the use of such contextual computing services to areas that had been previously populated with them. In addition, the experiment performed with digital broadcasting allows to acquire context information anywhere, anytime, i.e. anywhere visitors may be located at a given moment, following the stipulations of the ubiquitous computing paradigm.;The theoretical -novel approach to find simple structures and model the context of visitors en route-, practical and experimental results obtained from the implementation of the developed ontology in feasible scenarios, suggest a significant impact on the realm of contextual computing in general and on contextual computing in tourism in particular.