Providing other people's trails for navigation assistance in physical environments

Asking other people the way has always been a widespread social wayfinding technique. In recent years wayfinding in unknown spatial environments has increasingly been supported by electronic navigation assistants. However, the social aspects of wayfinding, such as using other peoples’ experiences, have widely been ignored in the context of electronic navigation systems. In electronic environments such as the WWW the availability of community knowledge also driven by Web 2.0 paradigms becomes more and more valuable to users. Other people’s experiences, including recorded browsing paths and activities so called user trails are used for recommendation and navigation support and allow users to navigate vast information spaces more easily. In this paper we propose an approach for trail-based navigation in physical environments. An analysis and comparison of the concept of trails in both application areas establishes the basis for a trail model and the implementation of a trail-based navigation system prototype for mobile phones. Practical experiences with a prototype application and potential applications of trail-based navigation assistants are discussed in the context of a tourist scenario in the old town of Salzburg.