Murshid: A mobile tourist companion

This paper describes Murshid, a context aware mobile application that provides guidance to tourists traveling to a country. The user context is a key element of our application as guidance to the tourist is provided after sensing the context and a fine analysis of its ingredients. Our focus in this research was to establish a tourist model and to instantiate it with a specific tourist for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) which is becoming one of the ideal tourist destinations nowadays. Murshid is designed as client-server architecture and it uses GPS based location to provide a visual aid using UAE map. Murshid is flexible, user-friendly, portable, and support dynamic information. The application provides a set of services to tourists through their mobile handsets, namely: special event notification, weather forecasting, currency exchange, language translation, and location bookmarking and sharing. Each of the services provides tourism guidance according to the user's context that is dynamic by nature since we are dealing with nomadic users. The application utilizes different context information to adapt its functionality according to the surrounding environment. This information can be spatial, temporal, or related to the environment. The context model includes the user location, the user profile, the current date, events related information, and user interaction. The paper presents the context model, the architecture of the system and the services implemented. It describes also how the context is managed in order to adapt the system functionality to the changes that may occur in order to react accordingly at the right time, at the right place and for the right person.