Integrating heterogeneous adaptation techniques to build a flexible and usable mobile tourist guide

Intelligent adaptation is a key issue for the design of °exible support systems for mobile users. In this pa- per we present UbiquiTO, a tourist guide which inte- grates di®erent forms of adaptation: (i) to the device used (web access via Laptop, PDA, smartphone), (ii) to the user and her features and preferences (personal- ized interaction), (iii) to the context of interaction, and in particular to the user location, besides some other features such as the time of the day. UbiquiTO adapts the content of the service being provided (recommen- dation and amount/type of information/features asso- ciated with each recommendation) and the presenta- tion (interface). In order to achieve better performance it keeps track of the user behavior, updating and re¯n- ing the user model during the interaction. In the paper we introduce the architecture of the system and the choices we made as regards user, device and context modeling and adaptation strategies. We also present the results of a preliminary evaluation of the system behavior.