Information Technology & Tourism, Vol. 11 pp. 247–264 1098-3058/09 $60.00 + .00 Printed in the USA. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.3727/109830509X12596187864071 Copyright  2009 Cognizant Comm. Corp. www.cognizantcommunication.com TIP: PERSONALIZING INFORMATION DELIVERY IN A TOURIST INFORMATION SYSTEM ANNIKA HINZE,* AGNE ` S VOISARD,† and GEORGE BUCHANAN‡ *University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand and Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany †Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering (ISST), Berlin, Germany and Freie Universita ¨t, Berlin, Germany ‡City University, London, UK Advanced tourist information systems should offer more than relatively static information about sights and places. Instead, semantically rich information about sights should be delivered to the mobile users. Furthermore, tourists should not be overwhelmed by a stream of superfluous data that are unrelated to their interest, location, and knowledge of a place. Personalization of the information delivery to each traveler, together with their travel history, is therefore crucial. This article presents the major design issues of the personalized Tourist Information Provider (TIP). TIP is a combination of an event-based system (EBS) and a location-based service (LBS) applied to a mobile environment. We discuss the lessons learned from developing its kernel using a seman- tic network of sight-related information and considering the travelers’ interest and travel route, with emphasis on modeling decisions and their impact on the final system. Key words: Location-based services; User profiles; Semantic modeling Introduction 1. Timelines: Instead of providing only a large number of discrete pieces of static information about sights (as a travel book would do), infor- The development of advanced mobile informa- tion systems such as a tourist information system mation should be dynamically tailored to the personal needs and interests of the tourists as requires the application and transfer of semantic web technologies and modeling techniques into they travel. 2. Rich information: Semantically rich informa- the area of mobile applications. This article de- scribes some of the problems that emerge when tion about sights (e.g., groups of sights and their relation to each other) should be easily Web technologies are applied in this context. We considered three major design factors in develop- accessible to the tourist at any time. The mod- eling techniques developed for the semantic ing the tourist information system: Address correspondence to Annika Hinze, Department of Computer Science, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand. E-mail: Annika.Hinze@cs.waikato.ac.nz 247