WO2002037352A2

WO2002037352A2 - Method and device for providing relevant information for travellers

Info

Publication number: WO2002037352A2
Application number: PCT/EP2001/012560
Authority: WO
Inventors: Afsaneh Haddadi; Sebastian Iwanowski; Rainer Scholz
Original assignee: Daimlerchrysler Ag
Priority date: 2000-11-03
Filing date: 2001-10-31
Publication date: 2002-05-10
Also published as: HUP0301485A3; CZ20031512A3; DE10055678A1; DE10055678B4; HUP0301485A2; PL366030A1; EP1362314A2; WO2002037352A3

Abstract

A method and device for providing relevant information for travellers are disclosed, which allow the traveller rapid, economical access to information of interest to the traveller. The planning and execution of daily schedules for tourists, business travellers and other people travelling is thus simplified. The invention is characterised by a personalised menu operation, which takes into account position, time and present situation of the user. A particular feature is the use of context-dependent agendas for the daily schedule.

Description

Process and facility for providing relevant information to travelers

The invention relates to a method and to a device for providing relevant information for travelers.

The term "traveler" is understood to mean a person who is on the move, regardless of the reason. It can therefore be a tourist as well as one

Business traveler or someone who is on the way to a certain place or who wants to perform a certain activity, e.g. Shop.

The configuration and modification of a day's schedule of the traveler is to be designed as flexibly and individually as possible: This means a sequence of the activities of the traveler at different locations at different times. Analogous to the term "traveler", the term "daily schedule" is to be understood in a very general sense: a "daily schedule" includes a tourist's tour as well as the schedule of a business traveler. A "daily schedule" is also not limited to the course of a single day.

A communication medium is available to the traveler with which he can call up individual information, e.g. a WAP mobile phone or an information device in the car or a system of kiosks that are available at different locations.

With the help of this medium, a tourist should be informed about his daily schedule and about the objects to be visited and places of residence on the daily schedule. A business traveler is interested in meeting deadlines and would like to reschedule at any time and be informed about the effects. A person on the way to a specific goal wants to be informed about changes along the way (e.g. traffic jams) and a buyer about special offers that interest him.

The prior art teaches the following implementation options for the provision of the information: Special software modules provide the user with connections to databases. The software modules have one or more user interfaces, with the help of which the user can make inquiries or receive answers: The user can either search for data with specific content with specific entries, or the corresponding software modules can contact him in certain situations by itself.

The databases are generally of all kinds. They contain, for example, restaurants, hotels, sights, traffic information, event programs, economic data, etc. It is common to make suggestions in the form of menu entries for the entries. After selecting a menu item either a new palette of menu items is offered for selection or a desired information is made available.

The user must therefore advance through a cascade of menu entries selected one after the other to the content that really interests him. The “intelligence” of the user guidance is thus determined by the definition and sequence of the menu entries, via which the user can access the information that interests him.

In the variant that the software modules report to the user on their own, it is only known in the prior art that the user receives information about things that are nearby or to which the user is currently moving. The context therefore only depends on the position.

For a practical implementation it is important that as much information as possible is available. The problem then arises, however, that it takes a while for the user to specify his query precisely enough to be supplied with the information of interest to him. This is particularly time-consuming and annoying when input and output are subject to severe hardware restrictions, e.g. is the case with mobile phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants).

With a direct connection to centrally held data, there are also high communication costs if the user has to enter a large number of request specifications in order to obtain the desired information. It is only because of this cumbersome and expensive information acquisition that many potential users do without completely on such aids or use them less often than it might be helpful for them.

The intelligent user guidance tries

Accelerate information acquisition: A hierarchy of selection menus is defined. For each selection menu, the query topics that are believed to be most likely to be selected by the user are offered first. They are also offered in such a way that further specifications are unnecessary. Query topics, the selection of which is considered rather unlikely, lead to further selection menus. In this way, the user receives the desired information in the case of "unusual" inquiries only after "clicking" through the various selection menus offered. The problem arises as to how the user guidance should be designed so that a single user quickly comes to the information of interest to him.

Since the preferences of different users differ significantly from one another, personalization of the user guidance is an essential necessity: common procedures store data about the personal preferences of the user and offer the associated information at the highest possible menu level, ie as early as possible. General data such as age and gender are also used for personalization. The more specific the personalization is to be made, the more the user has to reveal himself in advance. On the one hand, this encounters psychological resistance, on the other hand, many users are unable to specify their preferences formally enough. You are then dissatisfied with the result of the personalization. The invention is therefore based on the object of specifying a method for providing relevant information for travelers which takes into account the individual wishes of the traveler to a high degree quickly and inexpensively. In addition, a device for performing the method is to be specified.

The first-mentioned object is achieved by a method for user guidance of information or service-providing systems for the provision of relevant information for travelers, whereby according to the invention all available data are structured in a structure and relationships between the structures are defined, the user guidance being determined by the Structures and relationships.

The second object is achieved by a device for carrying out the method.

Further advantageous embodiments of the invention are given in the subclaims.

The method of the invention overcomes the obstacles known from the prior art by proposing a new type of user guidance for travelers: the essence of the invention is that the possible actions and locations of a daily schedule are assigned to a given conceptual world, that is to say the databases are uniform be structured. This structuring does not require the use of similar databases. Common tools for such structuring, which can also be carried out after the database has been created, are an object-oriented concept or XML (Extended Markup Language). Relationships or rules are established between the structures, which depend on the location, the absolute time of the request, the current possibilities of the user and the relative time within the daily schedule. The user guidance should now make use of these rules and relationships.

The simplest way to use the rules and relationships is to take them into account when programming the user interface. In this case, the user interface can be optimally tailored to the individual user, but is relatively inflexible if something changes in the relationships and rules of the data on the part of the data providers.

Therefore, an advantageous embodiment of the method offers to define the structures and relationships between the data in so-called ontologies and to manage these ontologies in their own software modules, the "ontology managers". Each information and service provider has the option of his data and services to classify into an existing ontology or also to define a new ontology and make it available to the ontology manager, a separate memory .. The basic functionality of the user guidance then accesses the defined ontologies directly by mapping the ontology hierarchies directly an individualized user software can select the ontologies specifically or select "abbreviations" that can be set by the user.

If, for example, an ontology "dining options" divides the places to be searched on the top level into "restaurants", "cafes" and "fast food", then the user, when he has announced that he wants to eat something, a selection menu with exactly these three entries is offered. In a further exemplary embodiment, an individualized user software can also offer the names of the two favorite restaurants of the user also on the top level. If the user does not have a lot of time due to the daily routine, then the restaurants can be omitted.

In general, however, there must be the possibility for the user to announce that he does not want to select any of the options offered, whereupon a special menu is offered in which the user is led to the entries which had previously been regarded as too unlikely. In this example, the special menu would be offered if the user still wanted to decide to visit a restaurant.

Another advantageous embodiment, which is independent of the one described above, is the use of so-called “agendas” for a daily schedule: an agenda records the period in which a user has or would like to undertake a certain activity make use of these agendas and the rules defined between the structures.

The classification of all dining options in the restaurant hierarchy described above is again considered: A rule could be that someone who has just dined in a restaurant for at least one hour does not want to go to such a restaurant again immediately, but rather go to a cafe or want to do something completely different from a tour or a walk. A major advantage of the invention over the prior art is that the personalization for the user guidance is based on dynamic data, such as "what did the user do?" Than on static data such as "how old is the user?" , The state of the art knows at most from dynamic data the consideration of the place where the user is at the moment. The method of the invention, on the other hand, also takes time-dependent information into account in order to anticipate the user's future wishes.

Both the absolute time and the relative time within the agenda for the daily schedule are used. The example given above that a user who has just eaten does not want to go straight back to a restaurant is an example of an agenda-dependent temporal relationship. An example of a relationship with absolute time is as follows: The suggestion to go to a nightclub will hardly be made in the morning.

The use of an agenda is also an advantage when determining the position: While previously known methods explicitly localize the user with an independently working location method, e.g. GPS (Global Positioning System), can be used if the location procedure is not applicable (e.g. if the reception is poor or the device is not able to do so) the assignment at a time in the agenda can be used with the help of the Agenda stored positions to determine the position of the user.

The method of the invention is applicable both to the case that the agenda has been planned in advance, as well as to the case that the user can be guided spontaneously and the the resulting agenda is recorded afterwards. This recording can take place automatically, for example with the help of GPS. In this way, an agenda can be created automatically without planning ahead and the agenda-dependent relationships and rules can be used in the following proposals.

In the example of the restaurant visit given above, the user does not have to have planned such a visit a priori: If it is determined via GPS that he has just been in the restaurant for an hour, it can be assumed that he has eaten something there and he doesn't want to go back to a restaurant right now.

The use of an agenda of the type described here has clear advantages over the use of calendars, as are offered in many electronic appointment planners: These calendars only save entries of the users with time. The entries have no further semantic meaning, so they are only evaluated as comments relevant to the user. In addition, calendars only save entries that the user has explicitly entered. On the other hand, an agenda in the sense of the invention depicts the entire daily routine of the user: if the user e.g. has requested two points of the day that are in different locations, then the agenda also shows the journey from the first to the second location. In this way, it is not only possible to automatically check whether entries in time overlap (even this is not done with many appointment planners), but also whether the appointments can be met with the means of transport available.

Another embodiment of the invention is the consideration of situation-dependent capabilities of the user: As an example, the consideration of the question of whether a car is available to him or not. Depending on the answer to this question, he will be offered different connection options.

An advantageous embodiment is that the agenda and the data are kept in a memory that knows two different access options, a stationary and a mobile access.

In a simple implementation, mobile access is via a WAP cell phone. All user data, including the agenda, are kept in a central computer. The user communicates with this computer via mobile radio. Every entry by the user, i.e. also the selection of a menu entry requires the use of the mobile phone connection. The shortening of the necessary menu selections proposed by the method of the invention thus not only saves time but also costs.

In a further embodiment with the purpose of reducing wireless communication, the agenda and possibly additional data are additionally duplicated on the mobile device. The user can then plan his agenda on a stationary device, load the result of his planning on a PDA (as an example for a mobile device) and take it with him on his way. If he wants to request new information from the central memory, the PDA takes into account where he is, what time it is, what the user has already done, ie how far he has got on his agenda and in which situation the user is User is currently located (e.g. motorists or pedestrians). The PDA then makes appropriate suggestions to the user. The user can carry out any rescheduling and can also be warned or informed by his device if there are facts on the basis of which he has the Agenda has created, changed. Conversely, he can enter new wishes at any time.

The additional keeping of the agenda on the PDA reduces the need for communication with the control center to the case that the user wants to know something that is not stored in the PDA or that something has changed after the daily schedule has been created, e.g. an event date. For the latter, it is important that the agenda is kept in the central memory, because the initiative for communication must then come from the headquarters.

As "additional data" to an agenda, for example, all tourist information that is in a certain local and temporal proximity to the agenda can also be downloaded to the PDA so that the traveler can easily reschedule without consulting the head office.

The present method and the proposed device, which comprises all means for carrying out the method, offers the traveler an optimal individualized structuring of his or her time sequence with regard to time, location and situation. The means to be used for this are also extremely versatile in terms of hardware.

Claims

claims

1.Procedure to provide relevant information to travelers, that is, that all available data is structured in a structure and relationships between the structures are defined, whereby the user guidance makes use of the structures and the relationships.

2. The method according to claim 1, characterized in that the structures and relationships between the data are stored in a separate memory which can be described or used by the data and information providers, and the user guidance makes use of the structure stored in this memory ,

3. The method of claim 1 or 2, d a d u r c h g e k e n n z e i c h n e t, that the user guidance takes into account the current capabilities and capabilities of the user.

4. The method according to any one of claims 1 to 3, d a d u r c h g e k e n n z e i c h n e t, that the user guidance takes into account the time of the request.

5. The method according to any one of claims 1 to 4, characterized in that ß agendas are used, in which it is recorded, in which time period at which location a user has performed and / or could perform a certain activity.

6. The method according to claim 5, d a d u r c h g e k e n n z e i c h n e t, that the user guidance takes into account not only the absolute time but also the position in time on the agenda.

7. The method of claim 6, d a d u r c h g e k e n n z e i c h n e t, that the user guidance also takes into account the position of the user, the position being determined with the aid of the assignment at a specific point in time in the agenda.

8. The method according to claim 5, wherein the data and agendas are kept in a memory which has at least two different access options.

9. The method of claim 8, d a d u r c h g e k e n n z e i c h n e t, that the first access option is from a stationary device and the second access option is from a mobile device.

10. The method according to any one of claims 5 to 9, characterized in that the traveler first plans his daily schedule as an agenda on a stationary device, loads the resulting agenda and associated data onto a mobile device and can be guided by the mobile device on his daily schedule , with access to the central memory only for rescheduling and additional information.

11. Device for performing the method according to one of the

Claims 1 to 10.

12. Computer program product which can be loaded directly into the internal memory of a computer and comprises software sections with which the method according to one of claims 1 to 10 can be carried out when the product is running on a computer.

13. Computer program product which is stored on a computer-suitable medium and has computer-readable program means which cause the computer to carry out the method according to one of claims 1 to 10.