Accessing Cultural Tourist Information Via a Context-Sensitive Tourist Guide

Recent developments in both wireless communications and personal navigation technologies have made the concept of location-aware services both feasible and economical. Indeed, it is widely projected that the market for such services will increase substantially in the coming years. Obviously this market will provide significant opportunities and challenges for the tourism sector. In this article, a vision of how an electronic context-aware tourist guide might operate is presented. An implementation of such a guide, designed to meet the particular needs of cultural tourists, is described. Finally, some issues that require further research before such systems can be deployed are identified.