A Contextual Geofencing Mobile Tourism Service

Tourists have become active mobile technology users while on route. They request information anytime, anywhere, so it has to be personalized to better satisfy their needs. This paper presents a Contextual Geofencing Mobile Tourism Service that proactively sends push based notifications to visitors ́ mobile devices according to their context. These notifications are linked to concrete areas and to specific context conditions. This way, if a visitor is inside an area that contains a notification and her context values match the defined conditions, the system will send that notification to the visitor. The service is composed of a mobile client, where visitors receive and manage notifications and a web client, where tourism entities (e.g., tourism offices, restaurants) can define virtual areas, create notifications and configure the context conditions that trigger the notification sending process. The implemented architecture and some user experiences are also described.