| Abstract |
Technological advances in mobile devices and applications during the last few years have caused a boost in the emergence of location-based and mobile ubiquitous services. This new emerging Ubiquitous System paradigm commands the interaction of user in a new personalized, context-aware and content-adaptive environment. The continuously increasing use of GPS technology has already given new meaning to electronically assisted navigation in the context of outdoors environments. However, little focus has been given to indoors navigation, and even less to semantically enriched navigation. Most existing approaches are based exclusively on geometric information and neglect important aspects like semantics bound to building areas and user profiles. Considering recent trends, the present work proposes a framework for structuring advanced location-based and context-aware services that integrates up-to-date technologies and develops novel mechanisms and interactive interfaces by applying techniques and formalisms from the Semantic Web domain. The Contextual Navigation Guide for Indoor Environments combines expertise from three different research areas. The first area deals with user profile management while the second is focused on user tracking and dynamic re-planning during the navigation process. Finally, the third research area, which represents this thesis’ subject, deals with spatial representation and path-finding techniques. We make use of a hybrid model for representing the spatial elements which utilizes both semantic description and geometric modelling techniques and is capable of generating textual instructions for any given path. Moreover we propose a novel methodology for generating the spatial model from properly converted vector ground plans, which also may serve as the interaction map between the user and the system. Finally, the user apart from asking for a route to a user-defined destination also has another possibility, which is another novelty of this work. The user has the option to retrieve a time-constrained tour, where the destination is not predefiined but is actually inferred from possible fields of interest. In all cases the generation of the requested path is affected by the user’s physical/ mental/ preferential profile.
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Semantics-based navigation for a contextual guide
