Sharing (Location) Context to Facilitate Collaboration Between City Visitors

The sharing of contextual information between individuals is a notion that often sparks emotional debate. It is interesting to note that the majority of existing work on sharing contextual information, especially location, has focused on the privacy issues raised in the work domain. This paper describes our initial investigation into sharing context in the leisure domain. More specifically we investigate how location context may be usefully shared between city visitors. For example, visitors may benefit by i) knowing the whereabouts of family members, or, ii) determining the popularity of attractions based on the number of visits. Additionally the sharing of location might also encourage communication between visitors that are not exploring the city as part of a group. For example, noticing that a fellow GUIDE user is located at the city castle would be helpful if I could then contact the visitor to request his or her opinion of the castle.