WikEar − Automatically Generated Location-Based Audio Stories between Public City Maps

Many mobile applications that lead tourists to landmarks and businesses ignore the educational component of tourism. The systems that do satiate the tourist’s desire for learning about visited places require so much costly custom content development that they can only be implemented at very local scales. Moreover, these systems quickly fall out-of-date and continually have to be manually updated. In our approach, called WikEar, data mined from Wikipedia is automatically organized according to principles derived from narrative theory to woven into an educational audio tours starting and ending at stationary city maps. The system generates custom, location-based “guided tours” that are never out-of-date and ubiquitous – even at an international scale. WikEar uses a magic lens-based interaction scheme for paper maps, which have been shown to be particularly important in the tourist experience. By leveraging on the wide availability of large public city maps, WikEar avoids the costs of GPS and the interaction problems of small screen map programs.