A Navigation Engine for Ubicomp Environments

Because of the human need of exploration, navigation and wayfinding has been an issue since the early stages of the human history. Because a person’s capabilities to navigate in physical spaces are limited, he created certain tools to assist him, like, compasses, maps, GPS and other equipment. With the expansion of the world wide web, a new, virtual space appeared and the human desire for knowledge created a new navigation problem, related to the huge amount of data stored and the need to get to the desired information as fast as possible. Currently, ubiquitous computing manage to bring together physical and virtual space. Navigation in environments where both spaces coexists have raised new challenges. The problems of both environments have merged and new tools are required for navigation assistance. Here, we propose a navigation engine used to give a trace of user experiences, an understanding of the space’s usage and to help people navigate in unfamiliar environments by previously recorded user trails. We define the notion of landmark as the position of significant object in a landscape. In ubiquitous computing environments landmarks can be identified by a variety of things captured by sensors, such as physical objects, sound, smell or vision. A trail is the sequence of user interactions with the landmarks and contains both spacial and temporal information. Spacial, because of the physical position of the landmarks and temporal from the time the interaction occurred.