Location-based mobile E-commerce for tourist services

Abstract

There are many instances where tourists become strangers in foreign countries and have no way of discovering available services in place they visit. These services, which are known as location based services, are normally available to only subscribers of those services. For mobile users who are not subscribers this may be unfair, especially if a mobile user is new in that environment, as he or she remains unaware of services that are available. This research proposes a dynamic service discovery mechanism whereby every mobile user is capable of service discovery irrespective of being a subscriber or not. We developed a model for location-based service discovery in a mobile environment. With this model we were able to show how components of a location based application server in mobile commerce application could be modelled in order for them to perform their task, and how services could be advertised in the vicinity of the network coverage area by the LBAS so that the user who is entering that area would be able to access services that are available to him/her We then implement a prototype of the model to showcase the usefulness of the proposed model. Our last objective was to evaluate performance of the prototype system. We conducted usability testing where we asked different people, from different faculties, to take a tour of the system. This group was then interviewed to evaluate the user-friendliness and the easiness to learn testing of the system. In both aspects, the users were satisfied with system.