Multi-device Access to Customized and Geolocated Content on the Way of Saint James

SONIA Mª. VALLADARES, MANUEL J. FERNÁNDEZ-IGLESIAS,

ROBERTO SOTO, LUIS E. ANIDO Department of Telematics Engineering

University of Vigo As Lagoas, Marcosende 36310 Vigo

Spain {soniavr, manolo, rsoto, lanido}@det.uvigo.es

Abstract: - The proposed platform is intended to foster the dissemination of the rich Galician cultural heritage by providing a geo-located service infrastructure for the promotion of the Way of Saint James. Using a mobile device, pilgrims may access a personalized multimedia travel companion that will adapt its content according to their location and profile. This system has a powerful engine for generating dynamic playlists based on users’ particular location and declared preferences and interests. These playlists include multimedia content and learning activities adapted to the current user context. Contextualized education with geolocated educational activities related to the Jacobean routes is one of the main innovations of this platform, which blends technologies as interactive television, mobile communications, geolocation, semantic reasoning and e-learning. Key-Words: - TV programming, customisation, geolocation, The Way of Saint James, content recommendation, semantic models, education, tourism.

1 Introduction The continuous technological developments in mobile communications are driving a profound transformation in the way society understands and access to information. The advances in computing power and user interfacing, together with the integration of mobile and geolocation devices (e.g., GPS-enabled smartphones), allows us to conceive a new generation of smart systems able to adapt their behaviour to the location and context of a specific user in real time, that is, to support location-aware services. Although there are many different fields where these services may be introduced, tourism is an area of particular interest. In Galicia, Spain, tourism’s contribution to the region’s GDP reached 19.9 % [1].

Galicia is a region with ancient cultural traditions whose main example is the Way of St. James. Through this research we will try to engage Galician visitors into the Galician culture by providing a richer personal experience, as well as motivating tourists to come back to Galicia. Thus, in addition to merely informative content, the platform proposes interactive activities that combine leisure and informal learning. For example, pilgrims interested in architecture may receive at their mobile terminal information on major historical buildings along the Way (e.g., cathedrals, museums, cloisters, etc.) accompanied by educational videos and questionnaires on them.

To accomplish this technological development, first we performed an analysis of the state of the art, which will be discussed in Section 2, where we provide an overview on the technologies that support this platform, namely interactive TV [2], mobile technologies and geolocation, semantic technologies, and e-learning. Section 3 will be devoted to discuss the application of semantic technologies and techniques to the development of personalized smart recommendation services and to facilitate geolocated access to content. In Section 4 we describe the main aspects of the proposal, that is, the architecture, interfaces and implementation of the multi-platform developed in the context of this research. Geolocated media will be played at a mobile device or a Home Theatre PC connected to a classical TV set [3] placed at accommodation facilities along the route. In this latter case, a customized program grid specific to each facility will be provided. We also enumerate the main features of the system’s content repository and its content providers (e.g., public administrations, accommodation facilities, users, other commercial entities, etc.). Finally, we present the main conclusions from this research in Section 5. In a nutshell, the system provides benefits both to the visitors (i.e., pilgrims), and the local commercial sector, which will have a platform to advertise its services and products at a reasonable cost. Besides, public administrations may also offer higher quality information while contributing to the educational

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dissemination of the Way of St. James’s cultural heritage. 2 State of the Art Available online information portals related to the Way of St. James, like aCompostela.com [4], caminodesantiago.com [5], or xacobeo.es [6] provide general information on the Way, including routes, stages, points of interest, weather forecasts, etc. In some cases, they also support collaborative communication among pilgrims with online discussion fora, comments and ratings. However, information is basically static and cannot be customized according to individual pilgrims’ profiles or their specific geographical location.

Thus, we understood that it would be possible to improve present-day services through a multi-access platform offering customized multimedia content. For this, we need to integrate several technologies, namely Internet TV, mobile and geolocation solutions, semantic reasoning and e-learning.

Internet TV provides access to online interactive services through Internet-enabled TV sets. Besides, this technology also supports access to content through 3G/WiFi-enabled smartphones, game consoles, and Home Theatre Personal Computers (HTPC). These latter devices are small, low-cost computers with a Media Center application as Mediaportal [7] for MS Windows, or MooVida [8] and XBMC [9] for Linux and MS Windows. These applications have been natively designed for the visualization of multimedia content.

The blend of mobile and geolocation will support the delivery of geographically contextualized information. Relevant players in this sector as Nokia, HTC or Apple already include GPS devices in their smartphones to support applications to identify and track points of interest. The geo-positioning initiatives analysed in this research included Google Latitude [10], Fire Eagle [11], Plazes [12] and Facebook Places [13].

Semantic technologies will be used to support the semantic enrichment of information based on languages as RDF [14], OWL [15] and RIF [16]. These technologies facilitate the description, processing and adaptation by software applications of resources and services, and the generation of personalized recommendations on those resources and services according to users’ profiles. This strategy will convey added value to the information available to construct smart knowledge-based systems.

E-learning solutions support online learning and computer-mediated education and training, and

therefore the learning-aware distribution of content and knowledge in a given field. For this research, we studied several tools to support education-related activities through different devices. The most relevant to our research are Moodle and its broad portfolio of add-ons and plug-ins, and other Content Management Systems (CMS) integrating modules to create and deliver questionnaires, surveys and tests, like Joomla and WordPress (e.g., Surveys WordPress Plugin [17], Simple Quiz of Joomla [18], etc.). 3 Semantic Development The semantic development techniques give meaning to the information managed by information systems (e.g., a Web portal) so that computers can interpret and process it. The original Web or Web 1.0 is a syntactic web; we navigate through the information by means of links binding pieces of information. From a technical point of view, we only know that a piece of information is related to another, but do not know how or why. On the other side, semantic technologies are aimed to construct a knowledge base that enables us to access information items taking into account their actual meaning.

This approach to knowledge representation was introduced in the 60s of the past century, without much impact until the 90s, when the Semantic Web concept [19] was proposed by the W3C. This body is responsible for standardizing and disseminating languages for declaring logic statements (RDF / S [14] and OWL [14]), logical rules (SWRL [15]) and semantic queries (SPARQL [20]). These languages are supported by various software development frameworks (e.g., Jena [20]) and, most important, by different inference engines as Racer [21], Fact [22] or Pellet [23]). The first and the latter have been utilized in this research. 3.2 Ontology Development Process For the construction of the semantic model and the corresponding ontology that will eventually support the smart content recommendation system based on pilgrims’ profiles, we applied a methodological approach based on Methontology [25] including some adaptations from UPON [26]. When developing an ontology, each conceptualization is based on concepts, objects and the relations established among them. Ultimately, an ontological model will be used to improve the results obtained when querying the Web for relevant information, and even to navigate through it. Besides, ontologies

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foster semantic interoperability and constitute the foundation of Semantic Web tools.

In our case, the construction of the ontological model was organized across five phases, namely specification, conceptualisation, formalisation, coding and evaluation. 3.2.1 Specification Model This phase is intended to state the objectives, scope and context of the semantic model through competence questions. These questions, expressed in natural language, would be eventually answered by the system according to its knowledge about the domain. They are extremely useful for the validation of the ontology. 3.2.2 Conceptualisation Model This phase is aimed to identify concepts (cf., Table I) and relations among them. Figure 1 outlines the conceptualization of the ontological model designed in the framework of this research.

TABLE I. CONCEPTUALISATION MODEL

Conceptualisation Model

Concept Description

1 Channel General description about a channel.

2 Programm Description about a program inside channel’s grill.

3 Users Description about system’s users.

4 Recommendation

Description about relationship between a recommended program for a given user

5 Role Description about the role of a specific system’s user

6 Type Program Description about the type of program

7 Geolocation Description about a geolocated position of a program or a system’s user.

3.2.3 Formalisation Model Taking as input the outcomes of the previous phase, that is, the Conceptualisation model, this phase applies descriptive logic and Horn formalisms to express the previous model in a formal way. 3.2.4 Coding Model This phase is intended to produce the actual ontology code. For this, we used the W3C-standardised OWL language and the Protégé software platform. 3.2.5 Evaluation Model This phase is intended to validate the produced ontology prior to its implementation, according to the competence questions identified during the first phase. Now, competence questions are expressed in a semantic query language, namely SPARQL.

Figure 1. Conceptualisation phase’s outcomes.

4 A Multi-device System to provide Tourism-related Educational Services Next, we will enumerate the main features of the developed multi-device application. As discussed above, this platform will provide touristic and educational content to the pilgrims walking the Way of St. James through a network of personalized and geolocated TV channels, according to the pilgrims’ profiles, including their language, their interests (e.g., nature, religion, gastronomy, history, etc.) and their actual location along the Jacobean route.

This platform involves several interacting agents that cooperate to offer the implemented services: pilgrims, accommodation facilities, city councils, other public administrations, and entrepreneurs.

Pilgrims access the system through their mobile devices (e.g. smartphones, tablets). According to their automatically determined location, and to the declared interests collected in their profiles, the system applies semantic technologies to identify the most suitable multimedia content available. From this content, the platform generates a personalized playlist. Then, users may select any content from the playlist or just enjoy the complete playlist via video streaming.

Additionally, the system also queries a repository of educational content for relevant educational material. These educational objects include a collection of learning activities about the local culture and traditions. Pilgrims can revise the sequence of activities and check the degree of completion of each of them.

4.2 System Architecture Along this section we outline the main characteristics of each of the developed platform’s logical modules, that is, the platform’s architecture.

The underlying software infrastructure is based on a LAMP server (i.e., Linux, Apache [27],

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MySQL [28], and PHP [29]) running Ubuntu Server 10.04 LTS. The platform’s functionality is provided by a Map Visualisation module, which generates personalized maps of the area where each pilgrim is located. The Playlist Generation module generates playlist according to the results obtained from a semantic recommendation algorithm that takes into account users’ location, content metadata, the technical characteristics of mobile devices, and users’ interests collected in user profiles. Finally, The Educational Activities Generation module plays a role similar to the Playlist Generator, only that this time the target is educational content. This latter module also interacts with the VLE [30] at the back-end. The Educational Activities Generator sends users’ (i.e., learners’) status and responses to the VLE, which in turn supervises users’ learning progress and achievements.

Data management at the back-end is performed by a relational database, and more specifically by a MySQL system (cf., Fig. 2). Between the two options provided by MySQL for relation storage management (i.e. MyISAM [31] and InnoDB [32]) we chose the latter one, as it supports database integrity at the database manager level. This liberates the application level from implementing data integrity check mechanisms, which dramatically contributes to reduce the workload of the administration servers.

Figure 2. Excerpt of the relational data model.

After analysing several open source alternatives, we opted for Joomla [33] to take care of content management. Besides being a robust, feature-rich content management system, it implements a plug-in model that facilitates its extension and customisation to specific solutions. In our case, we also implemented a specific audio/video file server

to distribute multimedia content to the platform’s TV channels, the ExtendedReg [33] plug-in to extend user authentication and registration functionalities, and the hwdVideoShare [33] plugin offering multimedia storage and trans-coding to adapt multimedia assets to the users’ mobile devices. 4.3 System Interfaces Access to localized and personalized multimedia content is provided through three different user interfaces, namely HTPC-TV, mobile and PC. These interfaces are briefly discussed below. 4.3.1 HTPV-TV interface The HTPC-TV interface (cf. Fig. 3 & 4) is targeted to users lodged in accommodation facilities along the Way, and it provides access to TV channels in their vicinity and their corresponding programming grids. In this case, geolocation and personalization is focused respectively on the vicinity of a given facility and on content useful to prepare the next stages along the route or to discover and learn about relevant touristic and cultural landmarks in the area or along the next stages (e.g., historical landmarks, gastronomy, local traditions, etc.).

Figure 3. Capture of the TV-HTPC interface I.

Figure 4. Capture of the TV-HTPC interface II

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Figure 5. Capture of the Mobile interface.

Figure 6. Capture of the PC interface.

4.3.2 Mobile Interface The pilgrims’ mobile interface (cf. Fig. 5) requires a 3G-enabled Android smartphone or tablet. Through this specific interface, users will access to personalized touristic and educational content according to their profile and interests anytime and anywhere. Besides accessing to the personalized playlist and programming grid, users may also upload and geolocate their own multimedia content. 4.3.3 PC Interface This interface (cf. Fig. 6) is used to access a Web portal where designated users may assign content to the programming grid of specific channels. Once the user has been authenticated, an outline of the active weekly programming grid is displayed for the channels assigned to that user. The user may navigate across the grid, selecting specific time intervals or specific dates. Then, users may assign content to program slots. 4 Conclusion The research and development work discussed in this paper has been performed in the framework of a three-year project scheduled to be completed by

August, 2013. The main outcome of this project is an online platform to disseminate geolocated and personalized multimedia content about the Way of St. James through classical TV sets placed in accommodation facilities, and through smart mobile devices carried by pilgrims walking the Jacobean route. This tool also supports the upload of user-provided content, and the collaborative tagging and geolocation of this content. Besides, this project contributes to the state of the art in Internet technologies, semantic reasoning, geolocation and e-learning.

Finally, we would like to point out the contribution of this project to the social and economic development of Galicia as a tourism destination, and the improvement of the quality and relevance of the information that is now available to potential users, which in turn contributes to the promotion and the projection of the Way of St. James itself.

At the time of writing this article we are focused on the validation of the project outcomes, namely the developed platform and the services provided. For that, we have designed some validation mechanisms intended to increase the impact of this research.

Once the system has been deployed and services are available to registered users, we are selecting a user sample representing each of the identified user roles as field testers, together with pilgrims that had no access to this solution to be used as control individuals. In parallel, we are completing a validation suite to evaluate the platform’s completeness, usability and robustness. This suite includes pre-usage and post-usage perception questionnaires, and a comprehensive log system to record users’ activities and interactions to be further analysed. Acknowledgment:

This work has been performed under the support of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) and the Galician Regional Government under projects: (1) “Multi-device Multi-device Access to Customized and Geolocated Content on the Way of Saint James” (10TIC050E) and (2) "Consolidation of Research Units: AtlantTIC" (CN 2012/260).

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