Paper-based mobile access to databases

ABSTRACT

Our demonstration is a paper-based interactive guide for visitors to the world's largest international arts festival that was developed as part of a project investigating new forms of context-aware information delivery and interaction in mobile environments. Information stored in a database is accessed from a set of interactive paper documents, including a printed festival brochure, a city map and a bookmark. Active areas are defined within the documents and selection of these using a special digital pen causes the corresponding query request along with context data to be sent to a festival application database and the response is returned to the visitor in the form of generated speech output. In addition to paper-based information browsing and transactions such as ticket booking, the digital pen can also be applied for data capture of event ratings and handwritten comments on events. The system integrates three main database components - a cross-media information platform, a content management framework for multi-channel context-aware publishing of data and the festival application database.

REFERENCES

• 1: Anoto AB, http://www.anoto.com.
• 2: R. Belotti, C. Decurtins, M. Grossniklaus, M. C. Norrie, and A. Palinginis. Interplay of Content and Context. Journal of Web Engineering, 4(1):57--78, 2005.
• 3: B. Brown and M. Chalmers. Tourism and Mobile Technology. In Proceedings of ECSCW 2003, pages 335--355, Helsinki, Finland, September 2003.
• 4: EdFest Project Website, http://www.edfest.ethz.ch.
• 5: A. Pashtan, R. Blattler, A. Heusser, and P. Scheuermann. CATIS: A Context-Aware Tourist Information System. In Proceedings of IMC 2003, 4th International Workshop of Mobile Computing, Rostock, Germany, June 2003.
• 6: B. Signer and M. C. Norrie. A Framework for Cross-Media Information Management. In Proceedings of EuroIMSA 2005, International Conference on Internet and Multimedia Systems and Applications, pages 318--323, Grindelwald, Switzerland, 2005.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.4 INFORMATION SYSTEMS APPLICATIONS
      H.4.3 Communications Applications
          Subjects: Information browsers

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation

Keywords:
interactive paper, mobile information system, tourist guide, voice interface, web publishing