The City Guide System is an extension of our Museum e-Guide project, covering local tourism services. Compared with the e-Guide system, the City Guide targets at a much wider application providing visitors with context-based information, by taking advantage of well-developed mobile technology to deliver city-level tourist information – based on actual visitor demand. The methods of implementation of tracking (location management) and managing (application and content management) the system are under development and the application will be able to work platform-independently, via the various available location technologies and bandwidth-cognitive content delivery.

The City Guide aims to provide visitors with convenient services to enhance their travel experience and reduce their prior preparation. The three major aspects we consider to be important as tourist experiences:

• Lack of infomation is always a problem on a trip
  • No accommodation in the late evening or midnight
  • Missed flight or train in rush hours or spend hours in waiting lounge
  • Cannot find favourite food locally, or too expensive
  • Shopping? Vouchers? Sending postcard to friends?
  • No ideas about where to look around (recommendations)
  • Lost their way, etc.
• Emergency? Help!!!
  • General help services
  • Real emergency
• After trip?!
  • What did I see? / Where did I see it?
  • Gift for anyone?
  • What to show my friends / family?

Using mobile and location-aware technology, we are able to know more about our visitors from their profile, and to transmit information based on each individual’s case base on their location, interests, financial abilty and time available.  The main goal of this project is providing a model to match following points:

• Free or minimum fees
• No extra equipment required
  • Mobile phone / PDA
• Simple enough for widespread use