ItoCamLife: A Platform of Sharing and Recommending Information Considering User Contexts to Facilitate Smart Mobility

Abstract

People do not always know about everything in the whole area even where they go about their daily life. Visitors to the area still more do not know about the area such as facilities and/or when and where to hold events in the area, means of transport to/from the area, and means of movements in the area if the area is too large for visitors to walk around, and so on. Although the main Web site of a local area such as a region, district, park or an organization usually works as a portal and provides the information above, the information is not always linked to with each other, in particular, on the map of the area except for facility names. Therefore people often feel difficult to find information related to their current or specified positions. Considering these problems, in this paper, we discuss an information sharing and recommendation platform specialized to a local area. The platform provides a variety of information associated with a map of the area, which means the information is linked with each other through the map. As a case study, we present "ItoCamLife," which targets Ito Campus of Kyushu University. Ito Campus is one of four campuses in Kyushu University and the largest campus in Japan as one campus. More than 10 thousand people including students, members of faculty and staffs are commuting, and many visitors are also coming there especially when a big event such as university festival or a large scale conference is held. Therefore, Ito Campus needs such a platform of sharing and recommending information. In this paper, we present an overview of ItoCamLife, including its concept and current functions.