Implementing adaptive mobile GI services based on ontologies: Examples from pedestrian navigation support

As we are facing the dawn of ubiquitous computing (UbiComp) by emerging mobile devices and distributed applications, personalization is leaving the desktop domain, because adaptation and context-awareness play a major role in UbiComp in order to realize the user friendliness postulated for UbiComp applications. Adaptation is a relatively new concept for GI services. Therefore we introduce the related research areas. The two most important factors for adaptation are (a) context as the representation of the current situation and (b) the user itself. In particular how to dynamically derive information on the users’ properties is a research area applying learning strategies introduced shortly. We see these two concepts not isolated but propose an integrated situation model including several types of context as well as user parameters. After this introduction we present several approaches to realizing adaptive mobile GI services in the domain of pedestrian navigation and tourist information – representing first steps towards UbiGIS (www.ubigis.org). These include context and user-aware proactive tips, personalized tour planning and adaptive maps. Implementations and new concepts for extensions of these are presented. The paper closes by an outlook on open research issues related to adaptive GI services.