Design, implementation, and evaluation of a mobile exhibition guide

As mobile devices are increasingly merging into our daily lives, exhibition services are also facing innovation based on the newly available technologies. Our project addresses these new circumstances. We developed a mobile exhibition guide for the exhibition called "Mrs Brown's Big Day Out: Hamilton Women in the 1950s". That is organized by the Waikato Museum. The proposed system re-uses the TIP (Tourist Information Provider) system's framework and provides information via mobile devices to visitors on Victoria Street, which is an outdoor part of the exhibition. The information about a sight will be delivered according to visitors' current locations and their interests. We would also like to examine the possibility of re-using our TIP system within the application area of exhibition guide. Therefore, we built the mobile exhibition guide system under the TIP system's framework and developed corresponding services that tailored the system to the requirements of visitors and the exhibition organizer. During the development, we faced a number of challenges, especially, modeling the unknown and unstructured exhibition data into the TIP database. The development process as well as the implementation and evaluation are detailed in this report.