Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Mytilene E-guide: a multiplatform mobile application tourist guide exemplar

  • Published:
Multimedia Tools and Applications Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

This paper introduces an approach of enhancing the tourism experience by incorporating a tool that adopts a “web-to-mobile” model into tourism websites that allows for the adaptation of personalized tourism web content to be transferred to a mobile application hosted at users’ mobile device. These applications upon installation to mobile devices allow for browsing of adapted multimedia content with no requirement for constant network connection. Furthermore so we convey the development experiences of a multiplatform mobile tourist guide aimed at producing a personalized mobile guide application used in both an online and offline modes offering services to tourists such as a personal profiling-based recommendation system, a commenting system and location-based services. This paper focuses on the design, implementation and usability case study of a Multi-Platform Tourist Guide system for the Municipal Council of Mytilene, Greece.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Institutional subscriptions

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12

Similar content being viewed by others

Notes

  1. The Mytilene e-guide web application can be accessed in http://www.meguide.gr.

  2. k-means clustering is a method of cluster analysis which aims to partition n observations into k clusters in which each observation belongs to the cluster with the nearest mean.

References

  1. Abowd A, Atkeson C, Hong J, Long S, Pinkerton M (1996) Cyberguide: a mobile context-aware tour guide. Wirel Netw 3(5):421–433

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Baus J, Kruger A, Wahlster W (2002) A resource-adaptive mobile navigation system. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, pp 15–22

  3. Bertini E, Gabrielli S, Kimani S (2006) Appropriating and assessing heuristics for mobile computing. In Proceedings of the working conference on Advanced visual interfaces, Venezia, Italy, pp 119–126

  4. Burke D (2007) A short position paper for W3C/OpenAjax Alliance Workshop on Mobile AJAX, Sept 28th, 2007

  5. Buyukkokten O, Garcia-Molina H, PaePCke A, Winograd T (2002) Efficient web browsing on handheld devices using page and form summarization. ACM Trans Inf Syst 20(1):82–115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  6. Cheverst K, Davies N, Mitchell K, Friday A, Efstratiou C (2000) Developing a context-aware electronic tourist guide: some issues and experiences. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, ACM, pp 17–24

  7. Cheverst K, Mitchell K, Davies N (2002) The role of adaptive hypermedia in a context-aware tourist GUIDE. Commun ACM 45(5):47–51

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Chittaro L, Cin PD (2002) Evaluating interface design choices on WAP phones: navigation and selection. Pers Ubiquit Comput 6:237–244

    Article  Google Scholar 

  9. Economou D, Gavalas D, Kenteris M (2008) Cultural applications for mobile devices: issues and requirements for authoring tools and development platforms, ACM mobile computing & communications review. ACM SIGMOBILE 12(3):18–33

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. Economou D, Varitimiadis S, Samaroudi M, Gavalas D (2006) The effectiveness of personal digital assistants (PDAs), Audio-guides or paper leaflets to enhance the museum visit experience. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Museology (ICM’2006)

  11. Gavalas D, Economou D (2007) The technology landscape of wireless web. International Journal of Mobile Communications 5(5):508–527

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Goldman SV, Pea R, Maldonado H, Martin L, White T (2004) Functioning in the wireless classroom. In Proceedings of the 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education (WMTE’04), pp 75–82

  13. Google maps, http://maps.google.com/. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  14. Grun C, Werthner H, Proll B, Retschitzegger W, Schwinger W (2008) Assisting Tourists on the Move—An Evaluation of Mobile Tourist Guides. Mobile Business. In Proceedings of ICMB apos;08. 7th International Conference, pp171–180

  15. Harakawa T, Kamada T (2007) Embedded Ajax—Web 2.0 Optimized for Mobile Devices, W3C/OpenAjax Workshop on Mobile Ajax, white paper

  16. Hinze A, Buchanan G (2005) Context-awareness in mobile tourist information systems: challenges for user interaction. In Proceedings of Workshop on Context in mobile HCI at the Conference for 7th International Conference on Human Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services, Salzburg, Austria, September 2005

  17. Holzner S (2007) Ajax Bible, Wiley

  18. Jain AK, Dubes RC (1988) Algorithms for clustering data. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  19. Java ME Platform, http://Java.sun.com/Javame/index.jsp. Accessed 1 Mar 2009

  20. JavaServer Pages Technology, http://Java.sun.com/products/jsp/, Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  21. Jones M, Marsden G (2005) Mobile interaction design, J. Wiley and sons

  22. Kenteris D, Gavalas D, Economou D (2009) An innovative mobile electronic tourist guide application, personal and ubiquitous computing, Springer-Verlag 13(2):103–118

  23. Kjeldskov J, Stage J (2003) New techniques for usability evaluation of mobile systems. Int J Human-Comp Stud 60:599–620

    Article  Google Scholar 

  24. Kray C, Baus J (2003) A survey of mobile guides. In Proceedings of HCI in Mobile Guides. In conjunction with Fifth International Symposium on Human computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services. pp 1–5

  25. Kray C, Laakso K, Elting C, Coors V (2003) Presenting route instructions on mobile devices. In Proceedings of the 2003 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI’03. 2003, pp 117–124

  26. Malaka R, Zipf A (2000) DEEP MAP—Challenging IT research in the framework of a tourist information system. Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism, In Proceedings of ENTER 2000

  27. Mobile Google map site, http://www.google.com/gmm/index.html. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  28. MyCityMate homepage, http://www.mycitymate.com/. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  29. MySQL, http://www.mysql.com/. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  30. Nielsen J (1992) Finding usability problems through heuristic evaluation. In Proceedings of the ACM CHI‘92, Monterey, CA, 3–7 May, pp 373–380

  31. Nielsen J, Molich R (1990) Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces. In Proceedings of the CHI ’90 SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, New York, NY, USA, 1990. ACM Press, pp 249–256

  32. Nokia Maps Beta 3.0. http://www.nokia.com/betalabs/maps. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  33. Ophrys Systèmes, http://www.ophrys.net/audioguide_english/accueil.html, Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  34. Poslad S, Laamanen H, Malaka R, Nick A, Buckle P, Zipl A (2001) CRUMPET: creation of user-friendly mobile services personalised for tourism. In Proceedings of the 3G Mobile Communication Technologies, (Conf. Publ. No. 477), pp 28–32

  35. Proceedings of the 1st International Conference on M4D Mobile Communication Technology for Development (M4D 2008, General Tracks): 11–12 December, 2008, Karlstad University, Sweden

  36. Roaming: The roaming regulation|Europa—Information Society (2009), http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/activities/roaming/regulation/index_en.htm. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  37. Steinbock D (2007) The mobile revolution: the making of mobile services worldwide, Kogan Page

  38. Umlauft M, Pospischil G, Niklfeld G, Michlmayr E (2003) LoL@, a Mobile Tourist Guide for UMTS. Journal on Information Technology & Toursim. Werthner H, Veit E (ed) Congnizant 5(3):151–164

    Google Scholar 

  39. Vrdoljak M, Vrdoljak SI, Skugor G (2000) Fixed-mobile convergence strategy: technologies and marketopportunities. Commun Mag IEEE 38(2):116–121

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Wahlster W, Reithinger N, Blocher A (2001) SmartKom: towards multimodal dialogues with anthropomorphic interface agents. In: Wolf G, Klein G (eds) Proceedings of international status conference “human-computer interaction”. DLR, Berlin, pp 23–34, October 2001

    Google Scholar 

  41. Dublin Tourism on the Wireless Web, http://www.visitdublin.com/wireless/. Accessed 10 Jun 2009

  42. Zhang D, Adipat B (2005) Challenges, methodologies and issues in the usability testing of mobile applications. International Journal of Human Computer Interaction 18(3):293–308

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Acknowledgement

The research presented herein has been partially funded by the project “Development of a Digital Multimedia Guide of the Municipality of Mytilene for Portable Devices”, funded by the European Initiative Leader PLUS (2000–2006).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Cultural Technology and Communication, University of the Aegean, Mytilene, Lesvos, Greece

    Michael Kenteris, Damianos Gavalas & Daphne Economou

Authors
  1. Michael Kenteris
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Damianos Gavalas
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  3. Daphne Economou
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Daphne Economou.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Kenteris, M., Gavalas, D. & Economou, D. Mytilene E-guide: a multiplatform mobile application tourist guide exemplar. Multimed Tools Appl 54, 241–262 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0519-x

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-010-0519-x

Keywords

Search

Navigation