Enhancing the SmartRoom system with eTourism services

Tourism is large industry nowadays, and support from e-services is clearly demanded on the market (e-Tourism). We expect that existing computing environments for collaborative work can be enhanced with the e-Tourism services to take own niche on the market. For instance, such services can augment the primary collaboration activity by automation and assistance in constructing a social program or travel plans for the participants.

Development of e-Tourism services can utilize the emerging approach of smart spaces for creating computing environments for heterogeneous devices to share their resources. In this talk, we consider the case of SmartRoom system, which has already demonstrated the use of smart spaces for one demanded application scenario. SmartRoom provides core services for assisting such collaboration activity as conferences or meetings. Personal mobile devices are primary access and control points for users. The core services aim at support for intensive in-room collaborative work using surrounding devices for hosting the system.

We describe the next development step toward the SmartRoom enhancement with e-Tourism services. We propose e-Tourism scenarios for use in SmartRoom collaborative activity. We develop a smart space based architecture for this enhancement. We provide an ontology for representing and sharing the tourism-related information for service construction. Based on the architecture and ontology, we make design of several services for the case study. In particular, we implement a service for collaborative construction of social program for conference participants. Integration of this service into the SmartRoom system demonstrates the feasibility of the proposed solutions.