Experiences of Developing and Deploying a ContextAware Tourist Guide The GUIDE Project Keith Cheverst Nigel Davies Keith Mitchell and Adrian Friday Distributed Multimedia Research Group Lancaster University Lancaster LA14YR U K kc nigel mitchelk adrian comp lancs ac uk ABSTRACT The GUIDE system has been developed to provide city visitors with a hand held context aware tourist guide The system has been successfully deployed in a major tourist destination and is currently at the stage where it is publicly available to visitors who wish to explore the city Reaching this stage has been the culmination of a number of distinct research efforts In more detail the development of GUIDE has involved capturing a real set of application requirements investigating the properties of a cell based wireless communications technology in a built up environment and deploying a network based on this technology around the city designing and populating an information model to represent attractions and key buildings within the city prototyping the development of a distributed application running across portable GUIDE units and stationary cell servers and finally evaluating the entire system during an extensive field trial study This paper reports on our results in each of these areas We believe that through our work on the GUIDE project we have produced a blueprint for the development of interactive contextaware systems that should be of real value to those in the community who wish to develop such systems in a practical environment Keywords Context Aware Evaluation Interactive Web based Wireless 1 INTRODUCTION This paper presents a comprehensive description of the work carried out as part of the on going GUIDE project The aim of the project has been to investigate the many issues and challenges that arise from the development and actual deployment of a contextaware 14 2 electronic tourist guide in a practical real world environment i e the city of Lancaster Since starting work on the project we have enjoyed a great deal of collaborative support from the city s Tourist Information Centre TIC and also cooperation from Lancaster s City Council This support has been crucial in enabling us to successfully build deploy and evaluate the system Visitors to our city can access context aware information and services using their hand held GUIDE units The information presented to visitors is tailored based on the visitor s user profile and contextual information including the unit s physical location In this respect GUIDE can be considered as a sophisticated example of a Location Based Service LBS a class of service that it is predicted will have significant market impact over the coming years The GUIDE system utilises a high bandwidth cell based wireless infrastructure and this enables us to support interactive services and highly dynamic information including access to the World Wide Web In addition this same network infrastructure provides location information to the end systems thus obviating the need for a separate location system such as GPS The approach and focus of the GUIDE project builds upon the work of earlier context aware tourist guides such as the Cyberguide project 12 However the GUIDE system has been designed to meet the real requirements of tourists as determined by a comprehensive requirements study 3 Furthermore the project has been concerned with addressing the many human factors issues and practical problems that have arisen from our approach The structure of the remainder of this paper is as follows The related work section section two is followed by a detailed description of the GUIDE application section three In this section we discuss the application s requirements the chosen endsystem the user interface and the functionality supported by our application The next section section four details the main approaches underpinning our development of GUIDE More specifically we describe the design of our information model the GUIDE software architecture that processes this information model the use of tags for dynamically generating tailored web pages and the mechanisms employed for disseminating information Next section five describes the implications of disconnected operation Our evaluation of GUIDE is described in section six while section seven points to areas of future work Finally in section eight we present some concluding remarks 2 RELATED WORK Our work on the context aware GUIDE system is clearly related to the work at Xerox PARC on the location aware PARCTab 16 system This system utilised the Olivetti Active Badge infrastructure 15 for obtaining positioning information and also for the transmission of data such as e mail to the user s PARCTab The positioning information sensed by the system was used to trigger certain events such as notifying the user to collect a document when walking past the printer room The RADAR project 1 is conducting related and more sophisticated research into how the RF network itself can be used in order to locate and track users within a building with a view to supporting location aware services and applications In more detail the system processes signal strength information at multiple base stations in order to estimate user location with a high degree of accuracy i e with a location resolution in the range of 2 to 3 metres 3 THE GUIDE APPLICATION 3 1 Application Requirements The Cyberguide system developed by the Future Computing Environments FCE group at the Georgia Institute of Technology is a classic example of a location aware system The initial Cyberguide system 12 used wireless transmissions to detect a tourist s position and orientation using a collection of IR beacons These beacons transmitted unique IDs that could then be translated into a map location and orientation The outdoor version of the system utilised Global Positioning System GPS data directly The fact that mapping information for the small area covered was stored locally allowed the system to offer touring functionality even when disconnected from the network 3 1 1 Flexibility Also related to the work on GUIDE is the FCE group s Conference Assistant application 6 This application has been designed to support conference attendees by providing them with appropriate context aware information and collaborative tools via a PDA as they navigate conference rooms The conference assistant was developed using a distributed architecture that relies on RF based wireless connectivity and location