CURIOS Mobile: Linked Data Exploitation for Tourist Mobile Apps in Rural Areas

As mobile devices proliferate and their computational power has increased rapidly over recent years, mobile applications have become a popular choice for visitors to enhance their travelling experience. However, most tourist mobile apps currently use narratives generated specifically for the app and often require a reliable Internet connection to download data from the cloud. These requirements are difficult to achieve in rural settings where many interesting cultural heritage sites are located. Although Linked Data has become a very popular format to preserve historical and cultural archives, it has not been applied to a great extent in tourist sector. In this paper we describe an approach to using Linked Data technology for enhancing visitors’ experience in rural settings. In particular, we present CURIOS Mobile, the implementation of our approach and an initial evaluation from a case study conducted in the Western Isles of Scotland.