A Context-Aware Museum-Guide System Based on Cloud Computing

Introduction

Nowadays, tourism is one of the greatest and most productive economic activities in the world. This industry has been rapidly progressing in many countries (Yu, 2014). Tourism can be highly influential in economic, social and cultural developments in developing countries (Iso, Mishina, Shimazaki, & Ishibashi, 2008; Bojanic & Lo, 2016). With improvements in the financial status and social welfare of the middle class citizens, tourism has been booming, significantly.

One of the main concerns of tourists is the need for an appropriate guide. Many of them forbear to travel and visit places due to the absence of a guide. Others traveling without a guide, get confused without enjoying enough (Ferdiana & Hantono, 2014).

In the light of modern technologies, human life has undergone tremendous developments. These technologies have made significant changes to human lifestyle. With the advent and spread of new generations of smart phones equipped with different sensors such as positioning systems and the development of wireless sensor networks in public places (Guo, et al., 2014), a smart phone has turned into an interesting and popular Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) to help tourists. Besides, with advances in pervasive computing, the things around us have now processing and storing capability, and everyone can receive customized services on computers embedded in the surrounding environment (Saha & Mukherjee, 2003; Mohammadi-Bezanaj & Vahdat-Nejad, 2015). Mark Weiser was the first theorist who introduced his viewpoint on pervasive computing as the third wave of computing technology (Weiser, 1991; Vahdat-Nejad, 2014). Pervasive computing tries to be aware of user's situation as well as the surrounding environment to adapt the actions to the current situation (Beresford & Stajano, 2003). Pervasive computing applications are mostly context-aware. In other words, they receive context information characterizing the surrounding environment in an implicit way and perform appropriate operations, accordingly (Vahdat-Nejad, Zamanifar, & Nematbakhsh, 2013). Context is “any information that is used to characterize the situation of an entity” pertaining to the scenario of the application (Abowd, et al., 1999; Dey, 2001). The application uses this information to provide adaptive services regarding the current situation of the user.