In a study that provided unique insights into the challenges associated with developing location-based applications, the Lancaster Guide project used members of the general public to test a network-centric electronic tourist guide. We discuss two main topics. The first is our choice of positioning technology - beacons that broadcast using an IEEE 802.11 wireless network combined with user input. The second topic concerns techniques for generating custom tours for electronic city-guide systems. Guide generates these custom tours by taking into account multiple contextual triggers and user preferences. In practice, producing good tours and, indeed, assessing the quality of a tour are difficult tasks. While our analysis of techniques for producing custom tours is somewhat specific to the city-guide domain we believe that the majority of our work is relevant to location-based systems in general
The GUIDE project is widely recognised as one of the pioneering pieces of work in the field of mobile and ubiquitous computing. The project published widely in venues including CHI and Mobicom and the work is heavily referenced (>300 and >200 citations respectively). In this paper (>110 citations) we focused on the role of location in GUIDE ' describing a technique for supporting 'what's that?' style queries without requiring fine grained location information. IEEE Computer, 'the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society publishes highly acclaimed peer-reviewed articles' and has a wide circulation. RAE_import_type : Journal article RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics