SmartLab

Involved people: Luca Console, Anna Goy, Ilaria Torre, Cristina Gena, Federica Cena, Francesca Carmagnola

SmartLab is a research laboratory jointly runned by CSP, Comune di Torino and Dipartimento di Informatica (Università di Torino). For more information about the lab, visit the SmartLab web site (in Italian).

The current activity of the lab is mainly focused on the iCITY project. iCITY aims at developing an adaptive semantic multimedia tourist guide which:

• allows users to browse events which take place in Turin
• allows users to actively cooperate in the authoring process: posting their own contents (other events, comments, details, ...) and tagging existing events
• provides tailored, location-based contents
• provides a e-community environment where people can share experiences and knowledge
• takes advantage from social networks and users’ collective knowledge in order to provide accurate and trustworthy information
• is user-centered designed
• effectively uses semantic technologies in order to provide more accurate contents to users
• can be accessed through different devices (desktop, laptop, PDA, SmartPhone)

The main goal of iCITY is to show

1. how navigation and information retrieval in ubiquitous environment may be improved using Web 2.0 principles, in particular by means of social tagging
2. the advantages of social networks and users’ collective knowledge for providing accurate and trustworthy information

iCITY can be seen as an evolution of UbiquiTO, a mobile adaptive guide that provides personalized location-based tourist information about the city of Turin. UbiquiTO integrates different forms of adaptation: to the device (web access via desktop, laptop, PDA, smartphone); to the user (personalized interaction); to the context of interaction, in particular to the user location. The main limitations of UbiquiTO are consequences of a centralized production of content and the design of iCITY aims at overcoming some of these limitations. The content conveyed by iCITY are collected in RSS format from TorinoCultura, a web portal managed by the Municipality of Torino for informing citizens about cultural ongoing events in the city. However, differently from TorinoCultura, iCITY adapts content, presentation, and navigation structures to the specific users needs. Moreover, the user is actively involved in the process of content creation. The user may add

• events (and details on events) not provided by the input RSS, as well as comments and assessments on events
• tags, which are keywords, labels, category names used to represent a concept that a user may relate to a specific event according with the associations in her mind

In this way, the system turns out to be collaborative in a community and social network perspective. The content created by the users enriches the system knowledge, according to Web 2.0 paradigm, and it can be seen as a metaphor of the concept of peer production.

For more information about this project, please contact
Cristina Gena, or Ilaria Torre