Blended maps and layered semantics for a tourist mobile guide

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile applications are becoming more and more widespread, location-based services gain interest from users as well as service providers. In contrast with classical computing applications, location-aware services can contribute significantly to a richer user experience. Through the use of location-aware services the physical world can be enhanced by elements that are stored in a virtual world. Both worlds are aligned with each other by relating information artefacts from the virtual world with locations and areas in the physical world. We created a framework, ImogI, to support location-aware services centered on the principle of electronic mobile guides. Depending on the physical position of the user and the available connectivity, services can be accessed through a mobile device such as a PDA. Each service is presented as a semantic layer on top of the mobile guide and layers can be related with each other. This results in a generic approach to create location-aware mobile services that can take advantage of the underlying mobile guide. Furthermore we extend the map-based interface with a new technique, blended maps, supporting different inter-related views on the same area. These views can be presented in a different scale, either a constant or a variable scale.