Exploiting context to support social awareness and social navigation

Abstract

The utilization of context (such as user location and user profile) opens up many new avenues for encouraging social interaction. The web-based GUIDE system enables visitors to the city of Lancaster to interact with an information model that represents the city via a hand-held and context-aware tourist guide. Our current work is focusing on extending the functionality of the (previously single user) GUIDE system by making parts of the information model public. In particular, the physical location of visitors can now be represented in the information space in order to enable a form of social awareness among city visitors. In addition, visitors can also change the information space by, for example, augmenting existing descriptions of the city's attractions with their own ratings. We believe that explicitly capturing and tagging the context associated with ratings provides a powerful mechanism for automatically tailoring information presented to the user. Keywords Mobilecomputing, context-awareness, adaptive hypermedia, social awareness, social navigation. everyday objects such as coffee cups [9] and mobile phones [14].One of the most significant pieces of work to have investigated the sharing of location context took place at the Olivetti Research Laboratory through their work on the Active Badge system [ 16]. A variety of location-aware applications were developed utilizing this technology. One example was an application that allows a badge to behave as a simple audible pager that notifies the wearer when new e-mail arrives, but only when the system senses that the wearer is away from his or her office. However, all the testing and evaluation that took place was centered around the work environment, and so it was perhaps not too surprising that many users felt skeptical about having their location activity recorded and made available to others.For our work, the privacy implications are slightly different. Our users are tourists visiting the city, and are acting at their leisure. Furthermore, users may remain anonymous to the system if they wish. It will be interesting to investigate how these factors affect the privacy issues raised by previous work on the sharing of location information [ 10] [ 16].

Context-Based Workplace Awareness

“…In this way, context information can be used as context cues to make people aware of what is going on in the workplace. 2 Other projects have shown how the context cue 'where people are located' can be gathered by context-aware systems and presented to the user to support certain kinds of social awareness (Dey et al 2001;Cheverst et al 2000;Tollmar et al 1996). The weakness of many of these systems, however, is that they only support a single context cue (i.e.…”

mi-Guide : A Wireless Context Driven Information System for Museum Visitors

“…Visitors linked with an information model of the city using hand-held context-aware tourist guides. GUIDE used a cell-based 802.11 wireless LAN, covering the major tourist areas, to provide both positioning information and deliver static and dynamic information to the mobile devices [10].…”

Lo-Fi Matchmaking: A Study of Social Pairing for Backpackers

“…In the area of computer supported cooperative work (CSCW), social network research has often used e-mail or other online communications to discover relationships between people and group behaviour [6,7]. Research into tourist guides has also incorporated limited community tagging features [8]. Industry has recently merged social network theory with web site design and produced hundreds of networking services addressing dating, business, leisure, photos, pets and other common interests 1.…”