iGuide: Socially-enriched mobile tourist guide for unexplored sites

Abstract

The paper presents iGuide, a system that aims at enabling a socially enriched mobile tourist guide service, with the aim to address a much wider range of sites and attractions than existing solutions cover, including historic and traditional settlements, sites of natural beauty or unattended sites of cultural heritage where access to information is unavailable or not directly provided. The casual visitor will obtain information and guidance while personally contributing to content enrichment of the visiting places by uploading user-generated media (images, videos) along with personalised views about the acquired experience (comments, ratings). At the same time, users will receive supplementary location-based services and recommendations to enhance their visiting experience and facilitate their wandering in places of interest and their direct interaction with local provisions. iGuide targets to offer text-to-speech (narration), rich multimedia content including real time 3D graphics, augmented reality services and a backend Web 2.0 informational portal and recommender tool. © 2014 Springer International Publishing.