Gulliver's Genie: a multi-agent system for ubiquitous and intelligent content delivery

This paper introduces Gulliver’s Genie a context-aware tourist guide that assists roaming tourists. The approach adopted within this system is the deployment of intelligent agents, which collectively determine the user context and retrieve and assemble multi-media presentations that are wirelessly transmitted and displayed on a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). As a backdrop, we first consider the state of the art in terms of context sensitive tourist guides, telecommunications, positioning technology and agent technologies. Gulliver’s Genie considers user context in terms of position, orientation and user profile. System agents are strong intentional agents that base deductions on a mental state comprising of Beliefs, Desires and Intentions (BDI). This paper presents the design of the system together with a glimpse of the user experience. q 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.