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Today’s tourists expect to get personalized access to tourism information at anytime, from anywhere with any media. Mobile tourist guides provide the user with such a ubiquitous access. The prerequisite for this is the notion of customization, requiring awareness of the applications context together with appropriate adaptation mechanisms. Currently, there is a proliferation of mobile tourist guides, proposing an unmanageable number of diverse functionalities. This chapter sheds light on those approaches by identifying their strengths and weaknesses, thus providing the basis for next-generation mobile tourist guides. For this, an evaluation framework is used comprising detailed criteria for the two orthogonal dimensions of context and adaptation.

Ubiquitous web applications adhering to the anytime/anywhere/ anymedia paradigm are required to be customisable meaning the adaptation of their services towards a certain context. Several approaches for customising ubiquitous web applications have been already proposed, each of them having different origins and pursuing different goals for dealing with the unique characteristics of ubiquity. This paper compares some of these proposals, trying to identify their strengths and shortcomings. As a prerequisite, an evaluation framework is suggested which categorises the major characteristics of customisation into different dimensions. On the basis of this framework, customisation approaches are surveyed and compared to each other, pointing the way to next-generation customisation approaches.

PurposeUbiquitous web applications (UWA) are a new type of web applications which are accessed in various contexts, i.e. through different devices, by users with various interests, at anytime from anyplace around the globe. For such full‐fledged, complex software systems, a methodologically sound engineering approach in terms of model‐driven engineering (MDE) is crucial. Several modeling approaches have already been proposed that capture the ubiquitous nature of web applications, each of them having different origins, pursuing different goals and providing a pantheon of concepts. This paper aims to give an in‐depth comparison of seven modeling approaches supporting the development of UWAs.Design/methodology/approachThis methodology is conducted by applying a detailed set of evaluation criteria and by demonstrating its applicability on basis of an exemplary tourism web application. In particular, five commonly found ubiquitous scenarios are investigated, thus providing initial insight into the modeling concepts of each approach as well as to facilitate their comparability.FindingsThe results gained indicate that many modeling approaches lack a proper MDE foundation in terms of meta‐models and tool support. The proposed modeling mechanisms for ubiquity are often limited, since they neither cover all relevant context factors in an explicit, self‐contained, and extensible way, nor allow for a wide spectrum of extensible adaptation operations. The provided modeling concepts frequently do not allow dealing with all different parts of a web application in terms of its content, hypertext, and presentation levels as well as their structural and behavioral features. Finally, current modeling approaches do not reflect the crosscutting nature of ubiquity but rather intermingle context and adaptation issues with the core parts of a web application, thus hampering maintainability and extensibility.Originality/valueDifferent from other surveys in the area of modeling web applications, this paper specifically considers modeling concepts for their ubiquitous nature, together with an investigation of available support for MDD in a comprehensive way, using a well‐defined as well as fine‐grained catalogue of more than 30 evaluation criteria.

The penetration of high-end mobile devices equipped with GPS and enhanced

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Abstract. Modern Web applications are full-fledged, complex software systems. Therefore, the development of Web applications requires a methodologically sound engineering approach called Web Engineering. It is not clear, however, to which extent existing solutions from relevant areas, most notably software engineering can be reused as such for the development of Web applications and consequently, if Web Engineering is really a discipline on its own. This paper highlights the characteristics of Web application development as found in existing literature thus providing a prerequisite for analyzing the appropriateness of existing engineering solutions. The characteristics are categorized according to four dimensions, comprising the software product itself, its development, its use and evolution as a cross-cutting concern.

Information technology has been playing a fundamental role in the tourism industry for a long time. The Internet particularly is increasingly emerging as a perfect platform to bring tourism products direct to the customer. Web-based tourism information systems, however, are required not only to offer online brochures but also to provide both value and service. The Austrian tourism information system, TIScover, meets this challenge by focusing on three crucial points. First, high-quality access is provided, both by supporting ecommerce transactions and by allowing access to the system via the World Wide Web, info kiosks, and cellular phones. Second, the content is of a high quality that is achieved by enabling tourism information providers to maintain their products directly, as well as by integrating external tourism information sources. Finally, the system is designed in such a way that it is easy to customize. This facilitates employment of the system by the various kinds of tourism information providers, as well as by different regions and even countries.Birgit Pröll studied computer science at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. She has been at the FAW (Research Institute for applied Knowledge Processing) at the University of Linz since 1991. She has been engaged in industrial and research projects in expert systems and CAD, configuration management, relational and object-oriented databases, and information systems and e-commerce on the Web. Her current research interests are information retrieval and combining databases and the Web. Werner Retschitzegger received his M.Sc. and Ph.D. from the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria. He has been in the Department of Information Systems at the Johannes Kepler University, Linz, Austria since 1993. His research interests concern the modeling of Web-based and object-oriented systems, the integration of semistructured data with object-relational technology, and the application of Internet and database technology to the area of tourism information systems.