Building and Operating Context-aware Services for Groups of Users

This paper presents a framework for providing context-aware services in public spaces, e.g., museums. The framework is unique to other existing context-aware systems in implementing services as mobile agents and supporting groups of users in addition to single users. It maintains a location model as containment relationships between digital representations, called virtual counterparts, corresponding to people, terminals, or spaces, according to their locations in the real world. When a visitor moves between exhibits in a museum, it dynamically deploys his/her service provider agents at computers close to the exhibits via virtual counterparts. When two visitors stand in front of an exhibit, service-provider agents are mutually executed or configured according to which of these the services are for. To demonstrate the utility and effectiveness of the system, we constructed location/user-aware visitor-guide services and experimented with them for two weeks in a public museum.