| The main objective
of the mEXPRESS project is to introduce advanced
B2C and B2E oriented electronic services through
intelligent mobile devices, enabling
personalization, location-sensitivity,
contextual-awareness and management of
interaction, in information-rich and
information-dense environments, and more
specifically in exhibition shows, with a view to
extend to any such environment. To this end, it
will develop the necessary infrastructure within
the exhibition premises, utilize currently
available mobile networks and terminal devices,
and provide a supportive mediation platform that
will acts as the hub between visitors,
exhibitors and exhibition
organizers/administrators before, during and
after the exhibition.
The main scientific
and technological objectives of mEXPRESS can be
summarized as follows:
- Design and
development of the required infrastructure
and networking schemes (positioning
mechanisms, wireless networks, transmitters,
receivers etc) for the exhibition premises
that will be used to enable
location-sensitive interaction.
- Exploration of
positioning and tracking mechanisms in
closed environments using mobile devices.
- Exploration of
interoperability and convergence of Internet
technologies with mobile and local area
networking devices and infrastructures.
- Execution of
in-field trials and evaluation of the
technical and commercial advances and
constraints of the proposed architecture.
- Exploration of
models of visitors’ navigation behaviour
analysis, in crowded environments for the
provision of value adding-services according
to personal profile and contextual needs and
for the efficient management of the
exhibition premises. Consumer Right
Protection according to EU data protection
legislation will be taken into account.
- Exploration of
content management and referencing
mechanisms for the efficient content
provision of promotional material.
The above mentioned
objectives will be realized through the
implementation of the infrastructure at the
exhibition centers, as well as a multi-layer
architecture comprising of functional
components, multi dimensional information models
enriched with XML definitions, and dynamically
generated interfaces for a set of different
terminal devices (smart phones, PDAs,
info-kiosks, Internet browsers, etc).
The final technical
results of the project include:
1) The
infrastructure and tools to support
location-awareness, and content delivery in
mobile devices.
2) A platform that
will provide the following types of services:
- Indoor,
real-time navigation and tracking mechanisms
- Content
management aggregation and dispatching
mechanisms
- Interface
components to various mobile and Internet
networking devices that support a variety of
technologies including WAP, GPRS, UMTS, HTTP
and voice.
- Integration
schemes among the various platform
components such as positioning mechanisms,
networking technologies etc
- Tools for
statistical analysis of information
regarding the visitors behavior and
interactions with the surrounding
environment
- A contextual
personal scheduler for planning and
management of the whole exhibition
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