Task Model and Task Ontology based on Mobile Users’ Generic Activities for Task-Oriented Tourist Information Service

With the recent advances in mobile platform technologies, a variety of studies on contextaware information services for the tourist information domain have been undertaken. Many studies on ontological approaches to tourist information services, moreover, have been conducted. However, most studies have focused on upper-level or domain ontologies; comparatively, few have proceeded from the perspective of task ontology based on mobile users’ generic tasks. Thus, we considered the construction of a task model and task ontology based on mobile users’ generic activities for a task-oriented tourist information service. In this paper, we introduce 1) a generic task model based on travelers’ needs and generic activities before and during trips, which model accounts for generic tasks and task processes; 2) a task ontology based on the generic task model, and 3) a task-ontology-based TaskOriented Tourist Information Service (TOTIS). Using the generic task model and the task ontology, task-oriented menu can be constructed automatically by means simply users’ selections and context-awareness. Additionally, compared with the existing domain-oriented services, the TOTIS can facilitate more flexible searching of tourist information and make real-time determinations with context-awareness.